CRG explores the third major shift in American healthcare — from physician authority to institutional control, and now toward consumer empowerment. As out-of-pocket costs rise, trust in traditional systems erodes, and personal health data proliferates, individuals are increasingly directing their own care.
The healthcare industry in the United States has experienced two epochal shifts1:
(1) The emergence of physicians as an accredited group of professionals, who consolidated power by making advancements in scientific medicine, improving licensing laws and standardizing education. The American Medical Association was established in 1847 and by the 1920s physicians had a self-regulating profession with a virtual monopoly in providing medical care that likely peaked in the 1950s. They were their own bosses and ran not only their own…
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