Healthcare Rationing

Abstract

Health care has been rationed in Great Britain explicitly for many years. It is argued by many people that the same practice should be undertaken in the United States. It is considered by them that the death of an 85 year person is much less dilemma as compared to the death of a teenager therefore priorities and policies of age based healthcare rationing should be set by policy makers accordingly. However, the opponents of rationing of healthcare by age claims that such policy would infringe our moral sense of reverence for elderly persons. This paper seeks to analyze the arguments and counterarguments of healthcare rationing by age.

Healthcare Rationing

Thesis Statement: Health care should be rationed in United States. According to experts, America must ration health care in order to control medical costs.

Peter Singer, a bioethicist at Princeton University believes that the costs of the current health care in the USA make systematic rationing critical. Peter believes that in relation to the death of an 85-year-old, the death of a teenager is a bigger misfortune and this should be reverberated in our precedences.

According to him, health care is a resource in short supply, and so in a way or another, all scarce resources are rationed. Most health care is financed privately, in the United States therefore rationing is mostly by cost as an individual can get what the person or his employer can pay for his health insurance. However the existence of our current employer-financed health insurance system is only because of the fact that the federal government supported it by making the premiums tax deductible i.e., actually, government subsidies of over $200 billion for health care. Health care is rationed in the public sector, mainly Medicaid, Medicare, and emergency rooms of hospital, by long waits (queuing), requirements of high patient co payment, less compensations to physicians that put off some from attending to public patients and bounds on payments to hospitals. (Singer P., 2009)

Author of Setting Limits, Daniel Callahan, put forward that for life-extending health care for elderly more than the 70 or 80 years of age, government should say no to pay, and just pay for regular care intended for alleviating their pain. It is argued that the concerns of justice are up for grabs in this social debate. More than $9000 is spent by government per elderly person according to estimation, while spending per child is less ...