HEALTH CARE ETHICS

HEALTH CARE ETHICS
The following question will deal with how health care resources should be allocated. It also will introduce you to key theories in ethics: teleological (consequential) and deontological (nonconsequential). Your textbook will provide background on these concepts. Use these classic concepts to help you formulate the best answer. People live longer, healthier lives when they obtain preventative medicine during their early years. This can be seen through increasing life expectancies and better overall health. Examples include fluoridated water, childhood vaccinations, regular exercise, and fortified food. In short, preventative medicine pays big dividends by dramatically lowering health care costs and increasing the quality of life. Preventative medicine helps future generations but generally does little for those who are older. Treating a broken hip, for example, takes tens of thousands of dollars plus even more time and money for rehabilitation. This money could be spent on preventative medicine and research to help dozens of people down the road for every one person helped today. Herein lies the question: There is a limited amount of money to spend on health care, and there are tough choices to make. Should people be helped now, ignoring prevention and thus increasing the future health care costs (e.g., helping the needy or elderly before others)? Or, should people look toward prevention—perhaps being callous to those who need help now (e.g., elderly, uninsured) to look to the future? If people are concerned with the means but not necessarily the outcome, they are engaging in deontological (nonconsequentialist) ethics. If people are thinking about the outcome but ignoring the means, they are using teleological (consequentialist) ethics. Discuss health care resources and which position you would support and why. It may help to put yourself in one of the following situations: * Hospital administrator who wants to maximize profit * Elderly person on a fixed-income Medicare plan (minimum guaranteed federal health insurance) * Insurance companies that very much want prevention to lower costs * A young parent who is uninsured Give examples to illustrate and support your discussion. Use a minimum of 2 credible academic sources for your paper, and cite your sources in APA format