Patient-centered care for chronic illness is founded upon the informed and activated patient, but we are not clear what this means. We must understand patients as subjects who know things and as agents who do things. Bioethics has urged us to respect patient autonomy, but it has understood this autonomy narrowly in terms of informed consent for treatment choice. In chronic illness care, the ethical and clinical challenge is to not just respect, but to promote patient autonomy, understood broadly as the patients' overall agency or capacity for action. The primary barrier to patient action in...