In Your Body, Your Health Care, surgeon and policy expert Jeffrey A. Singer provides a vision and a roadmap for creating health care policy that respects the sovereignty of individuals as autonomous moral agents.
People are growing increasingly frustrated with the loss of control over their health care decisions and health care dollars. That is because the government has usurped almost all health care decisionmaking authority. The patient-practitioner relationship has, in recent decades, been ruled by “informed consent.” But this ethos is absent when it comes to the government asserting authority over adults’ health decisions. For example, policymakers decide what kinds of health professionals you may consult; what medicines you can purchase and under which circumstances; and what substances you can ingest or activities you can engage in by banning them. In Your Body, Your Health Care, Jeffrey A. Singer provides a principled vision of how a free society should approach health care policy and lays a philosophical foundation for the relationship between patients, the health care system, and the state—a relationship that respects the sovereignty of adults as autonomous individuals with moral agency. Through examples such as prescription requirements, access to harm reduction techniques, licensing laws across disciplines, and health facility approval rules, this book offers ways to make the state’s treatment of health care more respectful of individual rights and autonomy. Written by a longtime physician who is a cog in the health care system, Your Body, Your Health Care validates the people’s grievances and argues for putting patients back in charge.
