When should a health care system that is trying to maximize the health of an entire population deny an individual a specific treatment? What is the value of extending a life for a day, or a year?
In a long and excellent article for the New York Times, Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University, discusses the issue. He writes, “The case for explicit health care rationing in the United States starts with the difficulty of thinking of any other way in which we can continue to provide adequate health care to people on Medicaid and Medicare, let alone extend coverage to those who do not now have it.”
Rationing is one of the thorniest and most divisive issues in the health reform debate. Though we currently practice rationing (as does every health system in the world) it has become a dirty word in the context of health care. Singer writes:
Meeting last month with five governors, President Obama urged them to avoid using the term, apparently for fear of evoking the hostile response that sank the Clintons’ attempt to achieve reform. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published at the end of last year with the headline “Obama Will Ration Your Health Care,” Sally Pipes, C.E.O. of the conservative Pacific Research Institute, described how in Britain the national health service does not pay for drugs that are regarded as not offering good value for money, and added, “Americans will not put up with such limits, nor will our elected representatives.” And the Democratic chair of the Senate Finance Committee, Senator Max Baucus, told CNSNews in April, “There is no rationing of health care at all” in the proposed reform.
Read the whole story here.
Recent Comments