Meaning and Service Value of Medical Care: By: Venida, Joan M
Meaning and Service Value of Medical Care: By: Venida, Joan M
Meaning and Service Value of Medical Care: By: Venida, Joan M
of Medical Care
https://pedsinreview.aappublications.org/content/
38/7/320
Ethical Principles in Making Health Care Allocation
Decisions
Bioethical principles
Many causes of poverty have been suggested, with some focusing on the
individual and some focusing on group or systemic factors. Among the
most common causes or factors cited:
Lack of education
Lack of job skills
Lack of natural ability and intelligence
Lack of a country’s natural resources
Lack of scientific knowledge
Racial, ethnic, sexual, and age discrimination in employment practices
Lack of infrastructure (roads, communication lines, efficient government,
healthcare facilities, education facilities)
Corrupt or incompetent governments
Warfare
Natural disasters (floods, droughts, soil erosion,
hurricanes, earthquakes, climate change)
Poorly developed economy; lack of industrialization
Inefficient or ineffective economic systems stemming
from faulty theories
Religious influences preventing attempts at alleviating –
belief in fatalism, acceptance of natural disasters as divine
punishment, belief that the political and economic system
is “God’s will”
Pollution (especially water)
Barriers to Access
One way to look at the problem of healthcare access is in
terms of such factors as the following constituting
“barriers” to access:
On the first question, some people think (a) healthcare is like any
other consumer product or service (blenders, oil changes, etc.) that
some people can afford and some people can’t. (b) A different
perspective is that healthcare is a right that the government has a
moral obligation to provide to the entire population. (A follow-up
question would be: what level of healthcare?). (c) Somewhere in
between is the view that healthcare is a social good like highways,
education, and defense, and the government should distribute it
more fairly than by letting it depend on ability to pay.
The second question focuses more on how to most
efficiently provide healthcare. The usual assumption is
that those who think healthcare is not a right believe a
free market mechanism is the best system and those who
think healthcare is a right or a social good would go with
a government provided distribution. Thus two
theoretical approaches usually identified are the
“libertarian” position (free market) and the “liberal,
social welfare, distributive justice” position (healthcare
as a right). But this is not absolute. One may believe that
healthcare is a right and yet believe a free market is the
best overall mechanism to provide it (the government
messing up everything it touches) or, in contrast, believe
no one has a right to healthcare but believe it works in
the most organized, coherent fashion if the government
handles it rather than being left to the “chaos” of the
market.
Here are three traditional theoretical
approaches.