"Medical treatment these days is becoming more diverse and sophisticated all the time, but also more cost-intensive. In future it will be more difficult to offer everyone the full range of medical treatment available within a publicly funded health care system. What should the criteria be for distributing resources within a health care system fairly? These are the issues examined by resource allocation ethics".
The link below is well worth a read. As economics is essentially about the allocation of scarce resources, what ethics is involved in the decision-process? The first ethical principle I would suggest is to make the allocation process as efficient as possible. After that its more subjective and we get into normative economics, or...
Resource Allocation Ethics
The link below is well worth a read. As economics is essentially about the allocation of scarce resources, what ethics is involved in the decision-process? The first ethical principle I would suggest is to make the allocation process as efficient as possible. After that its more subjective and we get into normative economics, or...
Resource Allocation Ethics
2 comments:
interesting area - i think end-of-life-care in particular is an issue that will come to fore in the next few years. we have not to date had any real debate on it in Ireland.
I would concur that efficiency is a primary ethical imperative of any rational health service in the unfortunate reality of scarce resources.
When we talk about efficiency however we need to have a maximand (that which we seek to maximise) and that is where the confusion begins. What is our health service trying to achieve? What should it be trying to achieve? Does it know? who tells it?
The development of expensive curative medicines will continue and so too will their associated opportunity costs. The opportunity cost, especially when considered in terms of the benefits foregone from preventative medicine, is potentially enormous.
Allocative efficiency is teh big question in all of this : who gets what? Again this begs the questions: who decides and how?
Solution : "Sure, it'll be grand - We wouldn’t want to ask difficult questions. Anyone for another cup of tea?”
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