Medicine and Social Justice Essays on the Distribution of Health Care

Because medicine can preserve life, restore health and maintain the body's functions, it is widely acknowledged as a basic good that just societies should provide for their members. Yet, there is wide disagreement over the scope and content of what to provide, to whom, how, when, and why. In this unique and comprehensive volume, some of the best-known philosophers, physicians, legal scholars, political scientists, and economists writing on the subject discuss what social justice in medicine should be. Their contributions deepen our understanding of the theoretical and practical issues that run through the contemporary debate. The forty-two chapters in this reorganized second edition of Medicine and Social Justice update and expand upon the thirty-four chapters of the 2002 first edition. Eighteen chapters from the original volume are revised to address policy changes and challenging issues that have emerged in the intervening decade. Twenty-two of the chapters in this edition are entirely new. The treatment of foundational theory and conceptual issues related to access to health care and rationing medical resources have been expanded to provide a more comprehensive and nuanced discussion of the background concepts that underlie distributive justice debates, with global perspectives on health and well-being added. New additions to the section on health care justice for specific populations include chapters on health care for the chronically ill, soldiers, prisoners, the severely cognitively disabled, and the LGBT population. The section devoted to dilemmas and priorities addresses an array of topics that have recently become especially pressing because of new technologies or altered policies. New chapters address questions of justice related to genetics, medical malpractice, research on human subjects, pandemic and disaster planning, newborn screening, and justice for the brain dead and those with profound neurological injury. Reviews of the first edition: "This compilation brings a variety of perspectives, national settings, and disciplinary backgrounds to the topic and provides a unique survey of theoretical and applied thinking about the connections between health care and social justice... Physicians and others interested in this field will find this book an engaging introduction to the theoretical and practical challenges pertaining to social justice and health care." New England Journal of Medicine "Although much work in bioethics has focused on clinical encounters, there has been a current of discussion about questions of social justice for decades-at least since the allocation of access to dialysis was widely understood in the 1960s to be a matter of justice, not of medical judgment. This volume will facilitate heightened awareness and deeper discussion of such issues." JAMA "Impressively, the editors have chosen an array of essays that explore the philosophical and bioethical foundations of distributive justice; review the current practice of rationing and patients' access to care in a number of different countries; highlight the issues raised by various special needs groups; and then wrestle with some dilemmas in assessing priorities in distributing healthcare... This book is an excellent resource. " Doody's

Introduction; I. THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS; 1 Norman Daniels Justice, Health, and Health Care; 2 Paul T. Menzel Justice, Liberty, and the Choice of Health System Structure; 3 Mark S. Stein A Utilitarian Approach to Justice in Health Care; 4 Rosamond Rhodes Justice Pluralism: Resource Allocation in Medicine and Public Health; 5 Jonathan Wolf Health Risk and Health Security; 6 David Wasserman Aggregation and the Moral Relevance of Context in Health-Care Decision Making; 7 Stefan B. Baumrin Why There Is No Right to Health Care; 8 Kristen Hessler Equality, Democracy, and the Human Right to Health Care; and Allen Buchanan; II. ACCESS AND RATIONING; 9 Bruce Vladek and Elliot Unequal by Design: Health Care, Distributive Justice and the; Fishman unchanged American Political Process; 10 Stephen R. Latham Justice of and within Healthcare Finance; 11 Paul T. Menzel Setting Priorities for a Basic Minimum of Accessible Health Care; 12 Gopal Sreenivasan Why Justice Requires Rationing in Health Care; 13 Dan W. Brock Priority to the Worse Off in Health Care Resource Prioritization; 14 F.M. Kamm Whether to Discontinue Nonfutile Use of a Scarce Resource; 15 Lance K. Stell Responsibility for Health Status; 16 Patricia S. Mann Healthcare Justice and Political Agency 2011; 17 Mark Sheehan &Tony Hope Allocating Healthcare Resources in the UK: Putting Principles into; Practice; 18 John W. Lango Global Health, Human Rights, and Distributive Justice; 19 Michael Ashley Stein, Equal Access to Health Care Under the UN Disability Rights; Janet E. Lord, & Dorothy Weiss Convention; III. POPULATIONS; 20 Patricia Smith Justice, Health, and the Price of Poverty; unchanged; 21 Howard McGary Racial Groups, Distrust, and the Distribution of Health Care; 22 Rosemarie Tong Gender Justice in the Health Care System: An Elusive Goal; 23 Timothy F. Murphy Justice for Gay and Lesbian People in Health Care; 24 Anita Silvers Health Care for Chronically Ill and Disabled Patients: A Deficiency in Bioethics and How to Cure It; 25 Eva Feder Kittay Getting from Here to There: Claiming Justice for the Severely; Congnitively Disabled; 26 David Wasserman Cognitive Surrogacy, Assisted Participation, and Moral Status; and Jeff McMahan; 27 Loretta M. Kopelman Health Care Reform and Children's Right to Health Care:; A Modest Proposal; 28 Ian R. Holzman Premature and Compromised Neonates; 29 Leslie Pickering Francis Age Rationing Under Conditions of Injustice; 30 Fritz Allhoff Health Care for Soldiers; 31 Kenneth Kipnis Social Justice and Correctional Health Services; IV. DILEMMAS AND PRIORITIES; 32 Robert T. Pennock Are Pre-Existing Condition Exclusion Clauses Just?: Lessons from Causal and Ethical Considerations Regarding Genetic Testing; 33 David Ozar and James Sabin Oral and Mental Health Services; 34 E. Haavi Morreim Limits of Science and Boundaries of Access: Alternative Health; Care; 35 James Lindemann Nelson Just Expectations: Family Caregivers, Practical Identities and Social; Justice in the Provision of Health Care; 36 David R. Buchanan Justice in Research on Human Subjects; and Franklin G. Miller; 37 Leonard M.Fleck Just Genetics: The Ethical Challenges of Personalized Medicine; 38 Jeffrey Botkin, Rebecca Expanded Newborn Screening: Contemporary Challenges to the Parens Patriae Doctrine and the Use of Public Resources; Anderson and Erin Rothwell; 39 James Hitt Justice, Profound Neurological Injury, and Brain Death; and Michael Nair-Collins; 40 Rosamond Rhodes Justice in Transplant Organ Allocation; and Thomas Schiano; 41 Leslie Francis and Justice in Planning for Pandemic & Disasters; Margaret P. Battin; 42 David A. Hyman Justice Has (Almost) Nothing to Do With It: Medical Malpractice and; and Charles Silver Tort Reform

Rosamond Rhodes is Director of Bioethics Education at the Mt Sinai School of Medicine. Margaret Battin is the Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Internal Medicine at the University of Utah. Anita Silvers is Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University.