ETHICS & ALLOCATION--FOUNDATIONS OF AMERICAN HEALTH CARE

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DESCRIPTION: The applicants request $75,000 over three years for a Publication Grant to undertake research and writing for a book on the foundations of American health care policy. The purpose is to take a critical look at the moral foundations and conceptual underpinnings of welfare economics and their relationships to analytic techniques in health care policy. In particular, the focus will be on the underlying assumptions of rational decision and social choice theory that connect the two in the context of health policy. The book proposed by Dr. Faden would be co-authored with Dr. Madison Powers with critical input from Dr. John Eisenberg, Dr. Robert Kaplan, Dr. Allen Buchanan and Dr. Frank Richard. The book would be divided into five parts. The first part would provide an introduction to formal methods of health policy analysis and their conceptual connections to principles of resource allocation in modern economic theory. The second part would address the moral and conceptual foundations of these formal methods. The third part would examine the ethical arguments for and against the use of formal methods in health policy. The fourth part would analyze the status of formal methods in law and health policy. The fifth part would put forward a positive program for the choice among and use of formal methods in health policy. This section would include criteria specifying the proper contexts, methodological constraints, and ethical requirements for the use of these methods. The applicants are undertaking this project because they believe that no authored book has appeared which links these important areas of health policy analysis in a critical framework. Such a book would clarify health care policy issues which are vital to rational health care reform.