Public Health and Medical Care

Abstract

Public health policies programs are to be indiscriminately accessible and fairly distributed. Their traditional agenda includes preventive and therapeutic health care services for those segments of the population that cannot afford private insurance and out-of-pocket medical expenses. To date, N. Daniels has offered the most cogent argument in favor of a right to medical care when disease impairs access to equal opportunities, but this liberal approach is unsuitable for populations where a right to health and medical care is essential but does not stand alone, for socioeconomic inequalities also occurs in education, social security, employment, and environmental issues. Public health must disaggregate sanitary and medical issues from the more general social agenda, taking specific care of disease prevention, health promotion and, for the less affluent, the provision of medical care. Resources for a national health service being always insufficient, economist will continue to search for appropriate rationing criteria, whereas bioethics advocates that rationing basic goods will inevitably create unwarranted exclusions of individuals and groups in dire need. Since there is no ethically legitimate way of justifying exclusion of the needy, bioethics will continue to insist that sufficient resources must be available to cover the medical requirements of all those uninsured and unable to finance them.