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The Cash Nexus, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

Courts and legislatures have labored for decades to protect patients' choice of medical treatments, even though patients seize that gift less eagerly than lawmakers expect. Yet while courts have rushed to build the whited sepulchre of informed consent, they have fled from a related problem that patients actually yearn to solve and that actually can be ameliorated the plight of patients who perforce agree to a treatment before they know its costs and who receive a bill both unrelated to the treatment's value and several times what an insured patient would pay. Increasingly, patients must be consumers in the medical …