Ethics Governance
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| Article - Abstract. To view full article click on the article title. | |
eMJA: Money, morals and the conquest of mortality* Money, morals and the conquest of mortality. A recent editorial in the New York Times makes disturbing reading. It says, in part: . . . the number of Americans without insurance . . . stood at 39 million even at the end of the booming 1990s . . . more than 2 million Americans lost their insurance last year. The soaring costs are driven, in part, by the biomedical revolution of the past decade, which has produced an array of expensive new treatments for an ageing population, from drugs to fight osteoporosis to high-tech heart pumps. The result is a health care system filled with great promise and inequity — such as wonder drugs that many of the nation’s elderly must struggle to afford. Dr Janelle Walhout sees the paradox every day at the community clinic in Seattle where she works. “I’ve been thinking lately about the mismatch,” Dr Walhout said, “between how very high-tech medicine has become, with all these genetic tests for everything, mixing your medicines like fine cocktails, and our patients, who can’t afford them, can’t understand it, can’t get interpreters to explain it and are just not accessing those things.”1 This is a newspaper editorial from the world’s wealthiest country — the country that is the paradigm for development in the Western world. Full Article: http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/179_08_201003/lit10572_fm-1.html |
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2006 Ethics-Governance.com |
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