The Ethics of Health Care Rationing ─ An Introduction

"Health care resources - such as personnel, beds, equipment, and donors - are expensive and in scarce supply. Additional factors, such as rapidly aging populations, add to the pressures on such services. Given the scarcity such resources fundamental ethical questions arise: How are such resources to be allocated? Who should have access to them? How should massive inequalities in health care access be addressed? What sort of ethical principles should guide the distribution of health care? This book introduces and assesses these questions and more. Beginning with an overview of competing theories of justice, the authors examine the following key topics: - what is the value of health and how do we measure it? - what sort of distributive principles - utilitarian, egalitarian or priority-based - should we adopt? - are some kinds of principles discriminatory and if so, how can they be avoided? Should the elderly or disabled receive equal treatment compared to the able-bodied? - how much responsibility does theindividual have for her health? Why does the debate on responsibility for health lead so quickly to issues about class, behaviour, race and socioeconomic status? Throughout the book examples from the US, UK and developing nations are used to illustrate the philosophical issues at stake. These include the Oregon Medicaid plan, health service reforms in the UK, the World Health Organization study of diseases and the ethical issues that arise from natural disasters and epidemics"--

Greg Bognar is Lecturer in Philosophy at the Department of Politics, Philosophy, and Legal Studies, La Trobe University, Australia.

Iwao Hirose is Associate Professor at the Philosophy Department and the School of Environment, McGill University, Canada. He is the author of Egalitarianism (Routledge, 2014) and Moral Aggregation (2014), and a co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Value Theory (2014) and Weighing and Reasoning (2014).