| Summary: | In spite of its heterogeneous nature, the status of “patient” in the United States has changed considerably since 1945. Patients have taken on various roles. They were alternatively passive, anti-establishment, empowered, consumers and responsible. Groups of patients empowered themselves by contesting the principle of passivity and the socioeconomic inequalities that the doctor-patient relationship had come to embed. The patient empowerment movement effectively redistributed the power between patients and doctors, but the framework and logic of exclusion within which this relationship appeared was not challenged. The status of “patient” was therefore fragile, vulnerable to the changes in administration or shifts in ideological paradigms. The debates surrounding the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (2010) have notably shown the complexity of reconciling the emancipation of the American patient with the triumph of neoliberal ideas.
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