Health Insurance And Nation’s Wealth
Health insurance is imperative to the well-being of every person and the right to proper health care is a basic need that every citizen deserves to have provided by from their country. Not possessing health insurance is a major risk at a time when medical costs are sky high, the prices for prescription drugs are astronomical, and the charge is typically $50 for an office visit to your family doctor and for many Americans Fifty dollars in some cases, is a total 8 hours of the workweek. The United States is the only modernized Western nation that does not offer publicly funded health care to all its citizens; healthcare costs for noninsured persons in the United States are prohibitive, and insurance companies practices are often more interested in profit margins than healthcare services.
According to Dworkin and Daniels the United States should seek guidance on how certain cultures maintain access to care, considering that what communities actually do may not agree with what they need to do as a matter of justice. Nevertheless, if there is a common belief that individuals owe each other access to certain forms of treatment, and this assumption is mirrored in organizations trying to do so, it can give us some examples about what people believe they give each other. For example, we find different organizational access policies in different contexts, and the variations may not reflect differing opinions as well as income or social history differences. For all of their residents overseas, almost all developed countries have access to public health and individual medical interventions. Access to treatment is guaranteed in these nations, despite income and wealth gaps, by universal healthcare coverage schemes. The funding mechanism and organizational structure of these universal access programs varies considerably. Many plans are financed, such as in Canada, by general tax revenue; others through payroll taxes, as in many European countries; and others through a combination of public and private insurance schemes, as in Germany. Therefore, many schemes are financed more efficiently than others, because general tax receipts are more liberal than medicare and income taxes, and more inclusive than insurance costs in effect.
Many schemes include public ownership of hospitals with doctors and nurses, such as in the United Kingdom and Norway, as employees of the public wage system. Some include a combination of institutions which are private or public, but they have extensive public oversight of the benefits packages available to individuals, as in Germany. Many policies do not allow insurance plans except for the universal coverage plan, as in Canada and until recently in Norway; some allow additional insurance, as in the United Kingdom. Whether universal access to health care significantly reduces inequality in well-being, there is a general belief that it is the bureaucratic imperative. Thus, the traditional point of ideological reflection on health and justice was the development of the principle of universal access to health care. This most well-known justification is the statement made by Norman Daniels on equal opportunities, in which he asserted on the debate that healthcare lies about the instrumental amount that good health offers to preserve a fair share of opportunities. Since the explanation given by Daniels essentially implies that universal law eliminates health inequality, empirical writing on the way is welcome.
Norman Daniels talks about the similar statement in his 1981 article “Health-Care Needs and Distributive Justice” care is the place because health demands are “those things we want in order to maintain, restore, Or give practical equivalents (where feasible) to typical species functioning.” According to Daniels, stopping normal organisms going is to stop people from building their life plans in full and aiming for fulfillment, which is opposed to both themselves and their role in the world. But the issue is that the concept of fair equal opportunities is too general and indeterminate to tackle a family of 'unresolved problems with rationing.” One variant of Daniel’s justification scheme is called “accountability for reasonableness”. It involves looking for mutually logical reasons, advertising on the grounds for decisions, updating decisions in the light of the facts and arguments, and maintaining process compliance. The specific characteristics of such a fair system would need to be adapted to the administrative level to which it is used to decide what to cover. In addition, in keeping with these general conditions, decisions on the performance of a universal access benefit package should be reached through a fair, deliberative process.
Dworkin (1981,1994, 2000) is another general line of argument for universal access to certain forms of health care based on the idea that prudent individuals would be insuring themselves against the prospect of needing certain types of health care. The statement of Dworkin may be sketched as follows: First, it is our duty to treat people equally. Secondly, giving people equal resources is the best way to treat people as equals (and this concept can be seen to be true in principle by designing an acceptable initial auction, paired with appropriate forum-auction trading and insurance policies against poor results). Thirdly, suppose we had a level playing field in the U.S., for example, where wealth and income were shared equally, and all people had understanding of health care therapies and their effects as great as those of the best doctors, and no one had previous information about the specific risks faced by particular individuals. Then each person would act prudently, without government subsidies or otherwise skewed markets, to buy insurance coverage against different health needs. Dworkin also believes in a health system with universal access, what most citizens would prudently protect for should be included. What so many people would cautiously insure against should have been included in universal access health system. (Therefore, some types of protection would be unwise to include, and we should abandon the rescue rule that included them). The common idea between the reasoning schemes of Daniels and Dworkin is to combat any implausible opinions on what advantages a universal access program should include.
Without some more general premises for a view of justice, Dworkin's case cannot lead to an account of equal access to health care. In this respect, it recognizes the need to borrow rationale for universal access from more general justice issues with the equitable equality of opportunity. The points of contrast between Daniels' view and Dworkin's view are Dworkin's claim which focuses primarily on personal medical services and not wider measures of public health which reduce overall risk or more equally spread the risk. In addition to patient care and prevention measures, there is no discussion of therapies. In general, the claim seeks to develop that we need a more rational view of what we owe each other by providing healthcare than the indefensible view that what rescues someone from death or injury must be given regardless of cost or cost of opportunity.
I strongly believe that universal healthcare is a prerequisite for fairness because the view is aimed at promoting and not just equalizing population health: Equally poor health is not at the heart of the situation. To put it another way, the ultimate goal of health policy is for all employees to work normally; but that means that the main goal is both equal and optimizing. For example, when we think about investing in a new product or technology, we can decide to give some priority to those who are better off to those who are worst off in their health. But we may think how much importance we can offer to anyone who is a little better off if we can bring about a much greater change in health. Moreover, we might accept not to permit any small benefits to overshadow major ones, but we may also disagree if minor benefits outweigh significant benefits to fewer people of larger numbers. In these and other topics, rational people — people seeking arguments that can from the basis for a policy's shared justification — will disagree with how to make trade-offs among the conflicting interests at stake, while acknowledging that the overall goal of health policy should be to protect opportunities. There is no prior agreement on more fine-grained concepts that tell us how best to protect incentives in this area. Since there is no consensus on these principles, we should engage in a form of procedural justice or a fair process in order to achieve fair results.
References
- Daniels, N. & Sabin, J. E. (1998). Last chance therapies and managed care: Pluralism, fair procedures, and legitimacy. The Hastings Center Report, 28(2), 27-41.
- Daniels, N. (2017). Justice and access to health care. In Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/justice- healthcareaccess/
