Can a Health Care Market Be Moral?

Can a Health Care Market Be Moral?
Author: Mary J. McDonough
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2007-06-08
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9781589012875

Since the 1970s health care costs in the United States have doubled, insurance premiums have far outpaced inflation, and the numbers of the uninsured and underinsured are increasing at an alarming rate. At the same time the public expects better health care and access to the latest treatment technologies. Governments, desperate to contain ballooning costs, often see a market-based approach to health care as the solution; critics of market systems argue that government regulation is necessary to secure accessible care for all. The Catholic Church generally questions the market's ability to satisfy the many human needs intrinsic to any care delivery system yet, although the Church views health care as a basic human right, it has yet to offer strategies for how such a right can be guaranteed. Mary J. McDonough, a former Legal Aid lawyer for medical cases, understands the advantages and disadvantages of market-based care and offers insight and solutions in Can a Health Care Market Be Moral? Drawing on Catholic social teachings from St. Augustine to Pope John Paul II, McDonough reviews health system successes and failures from around the world and assesses market approaches to health care as proposed by leading economists such as Milton Friedman, Regina Herzlinger, Mark Pauly, and Alain Enthoven. Balancing aspects of these proposals with Daniel Callahan's value-dimension approach, McDonough offers a Catholic vision of health care in the United States that allows for some market mechanisms while promoting justice and concern for the least advantaged.

For-Profit Enterprise in Health Care

For-Profit Enterprise in Health Care
Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 580
Release: 1986-01-01
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0309036437

"[This book is] the most authoritative assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of recent trends toward the commercialization of health care," says Robert Pear of The New York Times. This major study by the Institute of Medicine examines virtually all aspects of for-profit health care in the United States, including the quality and availability of health care, the cost of medical care, access to financial capital, implications for education and research, and the fiduciary role of the physician. In addition to the report, the book contains 15 papers by experts in the field of for-profit health care covering a broad range of topicsâ€"from trends in the growth of major investor-owned hospital companies to the ethical issues in for-profit health care. "The report makes a lasting contribution to the health policy literature." â€"Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law.

Moral Hazard in Health Insurance

Moral Hazard in Health Insurance
Author: Amy Finkelstein
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2014-12-02
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0231538685

Addressing the challenge of covering heath care expenses—while minimizing economic risks. Moral hazard—the tendency to change behavior when the cost of that behavior will be borne by others—is a particularly tricky question when considering health care. Kenneth J. Arrow’s seminal 1963 paper on this topic (included in this volume) was one of the first to explore the implication of moral hazard for health care, and Amy Finkelstein—recognized as one of the world’s foremost experts on the topic—here examines this issue in the context of contemporary American health care policy. Drawing on research from both the original RAND Health Insurance Experiment and her own research, including a 2008 Health Insurance Experiment in Oregon, Finkelstein presents compelling evidence that health insurance does indeed affect medical spending and encourages policy solutions that acknowledge and account for this. The volume also features commentaries and insights from other renowned economists, including an introduction by Joseph P. Newhouse that provides context for the discussion, a commentary from Jonathan Gruber that considers provider-side moral hazard, and reflections from Joseph E. Stiglitz and Kenneth J. Arrow. “Reads like a fireside chat among a group of distinguished, articulate health economists.” —Choice

Marketisation, Ethics and Healthcare

Marketisation, Ethics and Healthcare
Author: Therese Feiler
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2018-01-19
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1351736841

How does the market affect and redefine healthcare? The marketisation of Western healthcare systems has now proceeded well into its fourth decade. But the nature and meaning of the phenomenon has become increasingly opaque amidst changing discourses, policies and institutional structures. Moreover, ethics has become focussed on dealing with individual, clinical decisions and neglectful of the political economy which shapes healthcare. This interdisciplinary volume approaches marketisation by exploring the debates underlying the contemporary situation and by introducing reconstructive and reparative discourses. The first part explores contrary interpretations of ‘marketisation’ on a systemic level, with a view to organisational-ethical formation and the role of healthcare ethics. The second part presents the marketisation of healthcare at the level of policy-making, discusses the ethical ramifications of specific marketisation measures and considers the possibility of reconciling market forces with a covenantal understanding of healthcare. The final part examines healthcare workers’ and ethicists’ personal moral standing in a marketised healthcare system, with a view to preserving and enriching virtue, empathy and compassion. Chapters 4 and 7 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Priced Out

Priced Out
Author: Uwe E. Reinhardt
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2020-09
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0691208530

Uwe Reinhardt was a towering figure and moral conscience of health care policy in the United States and beyond. Famously bipartisan, he advised presidents and Congress on health reform and originated central features of the Affordable Care Act. In Priced Out, Reinhardt offers an engaging and enlightening account of today's U.S. health care system, explaining why it costs so much more and delivers so much less than the systems of every other advanced country, why this situation is morally indefensible, and how we might improve it.

What Money Can't Buy

What Money Can't Buy
Author: Michael J. Sandel
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2012-04-24
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1429942584

In What Money Can't Buy, renowned political philosopher Michael J. Sandel rethinks the role that markets and money should play in our society. Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Should we put a price on human life to decide how much pollution to allow? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars, outsourcing inmates to for-profit prisons, auctioning admission to elite universities, or selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay? In his New York Times bestseller What Money Can't Buy, Michael J. Sandel takes up one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Isn't there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? If so, how can we prevent market values from reaching into spheres of life where they don't belong? What are the moral limits of markets? Over recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life. Without quite realizing it, Sandel argues, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. In Justice, an international bestseller, Sandel showed himself to be a master at illuminating, with clarity and verve, the hard moral questions we confront in our everyday lives. Now, in What Money Can't Buy, he provokes a debate that's been missing in our market-driven age: What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society, and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?

Moral Markets

Moral Markets
Author: Paul J. Zak
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2010-12-16
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1400837367

Like nature itself, modern economic life is driven by relentless competition and unbridled selfishness. Or is it? Drawing on converging evidence from neuroscience, social science, biology, law, and philosophy, Moral Markets makes the case that modern market exchange works only because most people, most of the time, act virtuously. Competition and greed are certainly part of economics, but Moral Markets shows how the rules of market exchange have evolved to promote moral behavior and how exchange itself may make us more virtuous. Examining the biological basis of economic morality, tracing the connections between morality and markets, and exploring the profound implications of both, Moral Markets provides a surprising and fundamentally new view of economics--one that also reconnects the field to Adam Smith's position that morality has a biological basis. Moral Markets, the result of an extensive collaboration between leading social and natural scientists, includes contributions by neuroeconomist Paul Zak; economists Robert H. Frank, Herbert Gintis, Vernon Smith (winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics), and Bart Wilson; law professors Oliver Goodenough, Erin O'Hara, and Lynn Stout; philosophers William Casebeer and Robert Solomon; primatologists Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal; biologists Carl Bergstrom, Ben Kerr, and Peter Richerson; anthropologists Robert Boyd and Michael Lachmann; political scientists Elinor Ostrom and David Schwab; management professor Rakesh Khurana; computational science and informatics doctoral candidate Erik Kimbrough; and business writer Charles Handy.

Health Care Economics

Health Care Economics
Author: John B. Davis
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2017-06-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317294017

The analytical approach of standard health economics has so far failed to sufficiently account for the nature of care. This has important ramifications for the analysis and valuation of care, and therefore for the pattern of health and medical care provision. This book sets out an alternative approach, which places care at the center of an economics of health, showing how essential it is that care is appropriately recognized in policy as a means of enhancing the dignity of the individual. Whereas traditional health economics has tended to eschew value issues, this book embraces them, introducing care as a normative element at the center of theoretical analysis. Drawing upon care theory from feminist works, philosophy, nursing and medicine, and political economy, the authors develop a health care economics with a moral basis in health care systems. In providing deeper insights into the nature of care and caring, this book seeks to redress the shortcomings of the standard approach and contribute to the development of a more person-based approach to health and medical care in economics. Health Care Economics will be of interest to researchers and postgraduate students in health economics, heterodox economists, and those interested in health and medical care.

Hooked

Hooked
Author: Howard Brody
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 390
Release: 2007
Genre: Medical ethics
ISBN: 9780742552180

For decades, medical professionals have betrayed the public's trust by accepting various benefits from the pharmaceutical industry. Both drug company representatives and doctors employ artful spin to portray this behavior positively to the public, and to themselves. In Hooked, Howard Brody argues that we can neither understand the problem, nor propose helpful solutions until we identify the many levels of activity connecting these purportedly noble industries. We can pass laws and enact regulations, but ultimately the medical profession must take responsibility for its own integrity. Hooked is a wake-up call for anyone expecting high quality, ethical medical care.