title: [Organizing health care: an ethical perspective].
abstract: Health care at population level is a complex problem. Having this in mind, the purpose of this paper is to focus on the goods that are ethically relevant in the process of caring for health at this level. We briefly analyze some of the Chilean health statistics that, although they show important improvements along the years, demonstrate that certain conditions are to be deemed as inadequate by both healthcare providers and patients. Ethics is a central component to determine how to structure and organize health care systems and how they should operate. We emphasize human dignity as an ethical corner stone of the health care system, along with other important values such as justice and humanization, under the scope of the ends of medicine, and other components such as technical competence of providers and the financing of the whole process. We conclude that as far as a health care system is organized in a way that medical practice is well ordered, primarily and fundamentally according the ends of medicine and the good of persons, such a health care system is ethically adequate.
authors.affiliation: Facultad de Medicina, Universidad del Desarrollo, Chile.
mesh_terms: D002677:Chile; D003695:Delivery of Health Care / Q000941:ethics* / Q000458:organization & administration; D004992:Ethics, Medical; D015276:Health Care Rationing / Q000941:ethics; D006801:Humans; D012935:Social Justice; D012941:Social Responsibility