Fairness & Distribution of Health Care

To appreciate the implications of justice as fairness for issues of health-care delivery in a society where the evidence is that access to appropriate health care is uneven, it is useful to look at Rawls's view of how society itself is organized. Rawls's analysis of modern social structure is very much a critique of the fact that access to the benefits of civil society have not been sufficiently distributed and diffused through upper and lower classes, i.e., those best and least able to survive and flourish in society. In particular, Rawls rejects utilitarianism in its various forms as inadequate to the real-world needs of modern society or the alleged needs of utopian society. His bias is in favor of the potentialities of the contract theory of social organization "as represented by Locke, Rousseau, and Kant," although he acknowledges that there has been a gap betwe

. . .
is more varied. Many questions arise: Is health care limited to hospital and doctor-nurse-patient-medication dynamics, or is nutrition counseling a legitimate feature of the health-care universe? What about the obligation of insurance companies to pay costs of elective surgery for some but not for others, and of emergency rooms to accept all cases? Questions of institutional responsibility for medical care arise in the margins, and the point at which medical patients who cannot do dirty work for themselves yet must be cleaned up after by others seems always in the background of any controversy over health care. But does this mean that middle class children ought to empty bedpans so as to equalize their experience of the lowliest stratum of society? Or does it mean something more positive and measurable, that (for example) special educational, welfare, or employment opportunity should attach to those who do empty bedpans as a public service? Rawls does not talk about specifics; he talks only about general goals and aims. Because the kind of service to be performed (by society's haves for the have-nots) and the performance of the service itself are so difficult to identify, it appears that what is most important about the moral wei
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
Pogge Rawls, Pogge Rawls's, Pogge Daniels, Consider Pogge's, King Cotton, Moreover Rockefeller, Pogge's Interestingly, Rousseau Kant, John Rawls, Daniels Rawls, health care, justice fairness, civil society, medical conditions, theory justice, social organization, medical care, pogge daniels, social institutions, minimally adequate, access minimally adequate, theory health care, self-induced medical conditions, institutions civil society, proper institutional response,
Approximate Word count = 6480
Approximate Pages = 26 (250 words per page)

More Essays on Fairness & Distribution of Health Care