ABSTRACT
This chapter examines activism that flows from the general predisposition Americans have to embrace individual rights. Activism in the area of race was one manifestation of an emergent rights culture, and Americans, primarily those of African-American descent, began questioning and often rejecting the status quo. The redistribution of power in the medical marketplace led Americans to start demanding more control over the way the health-care system treated them, both in life and in death. The emergence of a rights culture that fueled the consumerism movement in the 1960s quite naturally spread to the health-care arena. The chapter looks at consumerism in health care as manifested in the decline of the physician-patient relationship and the rise of alternative forms of therapy. The clearest and most explicit expression of health-care consumerism arising from the activity of groups is the Patient Bill of Rights, the end product of a study conducted by the National Welfare Rights Organization in 1970.
