Health Care Reform: Ethics and Politics

by Timothy H. Engstrom (Contributor), Wade L. Robison

Health care reform has been stalled since the Clinton health care initiative, but the political difficulties internal to that initiative and the ethical problems that provoked it -- of cost, coverage, and overall fairness, for example -- have only gotten worse. This collection examines the moral principles that must underlie any new reform initiative and the processes of democratic decision-making essential to successful reform. This volume provides careful analyses that will allow the reader to short-circuit the mythmaking, polemics, and distortions that have too often characterized public discussion of health care reform. Its aim is to provide the moral foundations and institutional arrangements needed to drive any new health care initiative and so to stimulate a reasoned discussion before the next inevitable round of reform efforts. Foreword by Thomas H. Murray. Contributors: Howard Brody, Norman Daniels, Theodore Marmor, Tobie H. Olsan, Uwe E. Reinhardt, Gerd Richter, Rory B. Weiner, Lawrence W. White Wade L. Robison is the Ezra A. Hale Professor in Applied Ethics at the Rochester Institute of Technology and recipient of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Prize for Social Science and Public Policy for his book Decisions in Doubt: The Environment and Public Policy. Timothy H. Engstrom is professor of philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology and recipient of the Eisenhart Award for Outstanding Teaching.

301 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006