Ethics in Healthcare: Dilemmas in Distributive Justice

Ethic in Health Care: Distributive Justice
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Ethic in Health Care: Distributive Justice For the last few decades, reforms in the health care sector have remained, by and large, a controversial socio-political subject, with regard to established policies.  Amongst the arising questions revolve around rationing of medical care in health care reforms. Some physicians deny the existence of such rationing, while others affirm its existence and think of mere distributive justice of health care as part of their ethical obligations. The term “injustice” in this context refers to unfairness in treatment and it prevails upon similar cases of not providing equal treatments to all populations (Summers, 2014). Health care rationing is, hence, the denial of potentially valuable treatment to a patient on the foundation of scarcity. Distributive Justice             The conception of distributive justice depicts the determination of what constitutes ‘fair’ upon determination of how to divide afflictions and benefits. Several concerns have been advanced with respect to distributive justice in healthcare. Available data report that 1% of U.S. population consumes 23.7% of medical care resources, and half of the population utilizes 3.4% while the other half utilizes 96.6% of healthcare resources (Summers, 2014). This poses the question on why so many people consume so little of the resources, and whether they could be less ill or simply they could be consuming less expensive healthcare resources because they cannot afford. This makes it an uphill task to distribute the burden of healthcare costs while maintaining its availability, affordability, and appropriate quality concurrently. This is experienced at every level from time spent on a patient by a physician to determination of healthcare bills. Distributive justice lies on the foundation that every individual should obtain similar share of costs and benefits (Summers, 2014).             Summers (2014) observes that there are several reasons to discriminate healthcare resources based on the need. He highlights that there can never be an upper limit to the c...