About the healthcare debate- who defines what is "normal health"?

In the Healthcare Debate and Disability Studies article over at Literature, Arts and Medicine Blog, the author asks the question "who defines normal health?", noting two related items in the NY Times:

One was Dr. Abigail Zuger’s book review of Normal at Any Cost by authors Susan Cohen and Christine Cosgrove and the other was an essay entitled "To Overhaul the System, ‘Health’ Needs Redefining," by Dr. H. Gilbert Welch. What these articles have in common is that both ask us to re-examine what is meant by "normal health." And both articles raise this issue in the context of current national discussions about runaway health care costs.

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Questions about the definition of normal, about who gets to define "normal," and about the medicalization of the body are at the core of disability studies scholarship. So it would seem that in the debate about health care funding and cost control, some of this scholarship needs to be injected. Policy wonks and legislators should be aware of this body of work. In the context of these two articles we could point them to the work of those who have addressed these issues for more than a decade. For example, Robert Aronowitz demonstrated in 1998 that disease definitions are influenced by the vested interests of physicians, researchers, and policy makers in the biomedical enterprise and are not immutable biological entities, disconnected from their cultural context (Making Sense of Illness: Science, Society, and Disease. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp 11-14).

Such vested interests abound - as we are all already knew, but are certainly witnessing - in the current debate.