Access to healthcare: Going beyond fair equality of opportunity
Access to healthcare: Going beyond fair equality of opportunity
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DOI：
10.1162/152651601300168861
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发表时间：
2001-03-01
影响因子：
13.4
通讯作者：
Green, Ronald M.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Green, Ronald M.
Daniels begins his essay with the reminder that a theory of justice for health and healthcare should help us answer three questions. Is healthcare morally important in ways that justify a more equal distribution of health than many other social goods? When are health inequalities unjust? And how can we meet competing healthcare needs fairly under reasonable resource constraints? While I basically agree with Daniels’s answers to these questions, I differ in important ways with the reasoning that leads him to his answers to the first and third questions and with some of his specific conclusions.With respect to the first question, I agree with Daniels that access to healthcare is a key component of a theory of justice and a just social system. However, I disagree with his effort to ground this position in the “fair equality of opportunity” requirement of Rawls’s second principle of justice. Instead, as I argued in one of the first articles applying Rawls to this issue (1976), healthcare should be classed among the basic primary goods governed by Rawls’s first principle of justice. These goods include rights and liberties, powers and opportunity, income and wealth, and the social bases of self-respect. The intuitive idea is that access to healthcare, like all basic primary goods, is important because it is instrumental to the pursuit of whatever other values we might have. Because of this, the idea is likely to find a very high place in the reasoning of people who are impartially designing the basic structure of their society.
