title: 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.
authors.affiliation: Catholic University School of Law, Washington, DC 20064, USA.
authors.forename: George P
authors.initials: GP
authors.lastname: Smith
mesh_terms: D015276:Health Care Rationing; D006801:Humans; D011050:Policy Making; D011788:Quality of Life; D040841:Resource Allocation