[I]ncreased choice among goods and services may contribute little or nothing to the kind of freedom that counts. ...[I]t may impair freedom by taking… - Barry Schwartz

There was a time when I was a boy when you could get any kind of telephone service you wanted as long as it came from Ma Bell. You rented your phone, you didn't buy it. Once consequence of that... is that the phone never broke.

It is no longer the case in the United States that you go to the doctor and the doctor tells you what to do. Instead... the doctor tells you "Well we could do A or we could do B. A has these benefits and these risks. B has these benefits and these risks. What do you want to do?" ...We call it patient autonomy... but what it really is, is a shifting of the burden and responsibility for decision making from somebody who knows something... to someone who knows nothing and is almost certainly sick, and thus not in the best shape to be making decisions...

There's enormous marketing of prescription drugs to people like you and me... They expect us to call our doctors... and ask for our prescriptions to be changed.