The Ethical Challenge of Providing Healthcare for the Elderly

Abstract

...It will be most important for our commitment to the elderly that, as Representative Pete Stark (D-California) has said, "politicians will stay out of the physician's office in terms of how they practice medicine." Patients, too, will play a role, because choice of coverage would be decided in a publicly accountable way. A plan like mine would seem to have the right balance of components, public and social responsibility combined with private decision making, individuation of care, and problem solving. I have suggested this balance of the virtue of justice can be obtained through standards of viability or function by which certain treatments are judged ahead of time to be appropriately discussed, and others are not. This status category method of controlling access and cost would enhance other features of what might be called multiple control national health plans because they would provide a multivalent basis for allocating care for the cherished elderly citizens of our countries.