Yvonne Denier - Böcker

Since the 90’s, issues of scarcity, priority setting, and rationing lie at the centre of most current debates on health care. In the case of health care, the three rival values are: social efficiency, justice, and decent-quality care.

Since the 90’s, issues of scarcity, priority setting, and rationing lie at the centre of most current debates on health care. These are pressing issues: one way or another, limits have to be set. As such, the question of what is involved in just health care becomes much more complex. This complexity can be represented as an inconsistent triad, a set of three propositions of which any two are compatible but which together form a contradiction. In the case of health care, the three rival values are: social efficiency, justice, and decent-quality care. It seems to be that we can have any two but not all three. Essentially, the central question is the following: how best to square the proverbial welfare circle. How can resources be matched to needs, or needs to resources in socially acceptable and economically feasible ways? This book attempts to answer the question how health care can be incorporated into a comprehensive theory of justice, while realising an acceptable balance between efficiency, justice and care.

In this book, an international group of philosophers, economists and theologians focus on the relationship between justice, luck and responsibility in health care. Together, they offer a thorough reflection on questions such as: How should we understand justice in health care? Why are health care interests so important that they deserve special protection? How should we value health? What are its functions and do these make it different from other goods? Furthermore, how much equality should there be? Which inequalities in health and health care are unfair and which are simply unfortunate? Which matters of health care belong to the domain of justice, and which to the domain of charity? And to what extent should we allow personal responsibility to play a role in allocating health care services and resources, or in distributing the costs?  With this book, the editors meet a double objective. First, they provide a comprehensive philosophical framework for understanding the concepts of justice, luck and responsibility in contemporary health care; and secondly, they explore whether these concepts have practical force to guide normative discussions in specific contexts of health care such as prevention of infectious diseases or in matters of reproductive technology. Particular and extensive attention is paid to issues regarding end-of-life care.