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Access to Health Care: Charity and Rights

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Part of the book series: Philosophy and Medicine ((PHME,volume 38))

Abstract

There are many problems associated with access to health care in the United States. Some of these problems are conceptual and definitional. The empirical literature on access, for example, lacks agreement even regarding the nature of the problem. It is not settled whether inequity of access is to be measured by utilization rates, by “process” variables such as travel or waiting time, or by market considerations [13, 6, 9, 13, 15, 18]. Paul Starr has shown that the problem of inequity of access has large-scale historical and sociological features which imply that historically there are several different problems of access to health care.1 Despite these problems, discussion of health care access in recent years, especially in political contexts, has tended to be expressed in terms of the language of rights.

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© 1991 Kluwer Academic Publishers

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Agich, G.J. (1991). Access to Health Care: Charity and Rights. In: Bole, T.J., Bondeson, W.B. (eds) Rights to Health Care. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 38. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-28295-4_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-28295-4_9

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-0-7923-1137-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-0-585-28295-4

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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