Variables in health care policy-making: resolving a quandary?

Abstract

Contemporary debate on health care resource management is tied to a central moral issue: how to achieve an optimum level of reasonable or appropriate treatment based on the medical condition of each patient. Failure to tackle and resolve this issue in a confident and forthright manner ensures that the present approach to health care decision-making will continue in a state of indecisiveness if not, indeed, lethargy. Undergirding this moral issue is the foundational economic dilemma of controlling costs while limiting access to health care resources. Crafting a just solution to an equitable distribution of finite health care resources is, indeed, a quandary, if not almost an impossibility. What this article seeks to do, nonetheless, is to undertake an examination of the principles, socio-economic values and public policies needed to formulate health care compromises necessary to achieve greater stability in the normative decision-making process. In turn, this will ensure, ideally, a level of distributive justice in the total allocative process.