When the health care industry came under the environmental microscope, the daily work of treating patients was discovered to be highly wasteful of natural and financial resources.
Given the well-established correlation across cultures between poverty and unhealthy lifestyles, can it be just to hold individuals responsible for choices typical of their socioeconomic sector? Aren’t patient-responsibility programs simply conspiracies to shrink benefits to the poor?
Undocumented patients in the United States with end-stage renal disease receive “compassionate” dialysis. Such patients oscillate between being marginally well and “ill enough” to receive dialysis while clinicians wrestle with complicity in a system that both offers and withholds life-saving therapy.
AMA J Ethics. 2018;20(8):E778-779. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2018.778.
Medicine is a service industry, the product of which is health care, and its practitioners deserve remuneration. But to some, the notion of medicine as a road to personal wealth is an example of free-market economics gone awry.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(8):780-786. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.8.msoc1-1508.