Reflections on health care consumerism: insights from feminism

Reflections on Health Tourism and Cross-Border Health Care

Buddhist Reflections on “ Consumer ” and “ Consumerism ”

This paper starts with a characterization of “consumerism” and the idea of “the consumer.” It then explores Buddhist attitudes on wealth and “Buddhist economics” before drawing on these to develop a critical assessment of consumerism as an ineffective and wasteful route to human happiness.

Ethical Reflections on Health Care Robotics

The rapid developments of robotics technologies in the last twenty years of the XX century have greatly encouraged research on the use of robots for surgery, diagnosis, rehabilitation, prosthetics, and assistance to disabled and elderly people. This chapter provides an overview of robotic technologies and systems for health care, focussing on various ethical problems that these technologies giv...

Establishing health care performance standards in an era of consumerism.

As the US health care system begins to reengineer itself to address the need for quality improvement, it also is being actively reshaped by the expectations of consumers. The confluence of these forces requires a new approach to setting health care performance standards. The National Quality Forum (NQF) has been established as a private, not-for-profit, open membership, public benefit corporati...

Health Care Consumerism: Lessons My 401(k) Plan Taught Me.

Changes to the U.S. health care system are here. As we think about how individuals will pay for health care--while actively employed and while retired--our experiences with 401(k) plans provide some valuable lessons. In order to support employees in this new health care world--a challenge arguably more daunting than the 401(k) challenge we faced 20 years ago--some very different types of suppor...