Assessing bioethics today

Our society clearly needs to set limits on health care. The United States health care delivery system is the fourth largest economy in the world, yet its inflation continues to grow at twice the normal rate of other products and services. The inefficiencies are built in in such a way that while intensive care beds are plentiful, and very expensive, 37 million Americans cannot gain access to health care because they are either uninsured or underinsured. It is estimated that this figure will approach 39 million by the end of the decade. Since many of these individuals are young, the problem, it is said, has no real practical consequences because the young are relatively healthy. Yet evidence exists that the uninsured and underinsured receive poorer care than covered individuals. This and other inequities in the system have led many thinkers like Leonard Fleck to ask how just we must be in society. The answer to this question would presumably help us determine the lengths we must go in correcting the inequities. Even if the peace-dividend emerges from the new political events around the world, and we are able to spend more of our money on health care, our resources are not a bottomless pit. If need alone drives the system, just performing open-heart surgery on everyone who needs it would cost more than the annual budget itself. Virtually everyone agrees, then, that escalating health care costs are a moral problem because justice is involved, a political problem because public interest is involved, and that limits must be set that are moral and public.