Buyer Be Well

As cutting-edge consumer wellness products and services increasingly assume the functions of healthcare, courts may be quietly replacing the complex legal protections of health law with contract law’s logic of buyer beware. Analysis of case law reveals how courts uncritically enforce terms in wellness contracts that could be deemed impermissible in traditional healthcare settings. The result is a potential blind spot where courts fail to directly account for the qualities that warrant health’s special legal treatment. Companies can thus mimic healthcare’s aesthetics and replicate its risks without assuming its obligations. By centering contract law in the governance of a subset of health-affecting consumer transactions, this Article challenges the myth that wellness is always meaningfully distinct from healthcare. It argues that as care migrates from public to private ordering, contract law not only facilitates the erosion of health protections but also holds underused tools that courts can leverage to restore them. It proposes a factor-based test to determine when wellness products functionally substitute for care. Ultimately, it warns that wellness is becoming a deregulatory tool, calling on courts to respond with modest doctrinal interventions that protect consumers and preserve some of the safeguards afforded to contracts in healthcare.