Abstract
Metaphors matter, as America’s defunct health insurance financing debate so well demonstrated. In that debate the traditional metaphor of American medicine, the military metaphor, was displaced in public discourse by the market metaphor. Metaphors, which entice us to understand and experience “one kind of thing in terms of another... play a central role in the construction of social and political reality.”1 The market metaphor proved virtually irresistible in the public arena, and led Congress to defer to market forces to “reform” health insurance financing in America.
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© 1997 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Annas, G.J. (1997). Changing Our Metaphors to Put Quality of Life at the Center of Health Care. In: Levy, J.A., Jasmin, C., Bez, G. (eds) Cancer, AIDS, and Quality of Life. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-9570-7_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-9570-7_8
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