Medical ethics and resource allocation in the NHS.
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Lewis and Charny have come under siege for suggesting remote questioning to decide appropriate medical care. While the criticisms are theoretically valid, the idea is so important practically that Lewis and Charny should be supported and their approach investigated as a way of making medical treatment at least more open and possibly more fair.
The problem of health care distribution in the United States demands immediate action. Many different solutions have been proposed to slow rising health care costs and to improve access to care for the poor and uninsured. Debate among proponents of these various proposals might be advanced if a common language were adopted with regard to certain key terms instead of the various meanings currently assigned to these terms. For this reason, we propose and defend the following three definitions: (1) rationing is the societal toleration of inequitable access to health services acknowledged to be necessary by reference to necessary-care guidelines; (2) health care needs are desires for services that have been reasonably well demonstrated to provide significant net benefit for patients with specified clinical conditions; and (3) basic benefit plans are insurance packages that provide for all and only acknowledged health care needs, again by reference to appropriate clinical guidelines.
Even though there is substantial pressure on physicians to significantly reduce the amount of public monies spent on geriatric health care, it is improper for physicians to let financial concerns take precedence over their obligations to care for the patients who seek their services and assistance. The doctor/patient relationship demands that the physician be faithful to the cause of meeting the needs of patients. This faith is kept by taking all necessary steps to respect and promote the autonomy of patients. This is best done by adhering to a commitment of pursuing a process of communication with patients that leads to the attainment of informed consent or refusal from patients. Two consequences likely to follow are protection of many patients from protracted, miserable deaths because of less use of invasive medical procedures, and subsequent financial savings from this lower degree of use.
The increasing complexity of health care systems in Europe, the financial limits of the public sector one hand, and a political consensus in favour of equal accessibility to services on the other, are at the origin of a widening gap between "individual" ethics (i.e. of health care professionals) and societal ethics. An additional conflict is that between equal accessibility and operational and distributive efficiency.
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This paper addresses the question of the most appropriate theoretical account of the phenomena of orienting and habituation. Several lines of evidence are reviewed. First, it is argued that the effects of stimulus omission require a comparator theory in which it is asserted that responses to iterated events result from a comparison between predicted and actual stimulus input. Second, the data from studies in which paired stimulus events are employed seem, at least at first sight, to be best explained in terms of a comparator theory in which a key role is ascribed to associative processes. Third, secondary task probe reaction time data indicate that events that elicit orienting also command processing resources, and that habituation involves changes in the manner in which events are processed. Finally, recent data on the effects of intermodality change indicate that electrodermal responses are larger on the change trial than on the first habituation training trial; these results seem problematical for noncomparator theories. However, other data on the context-specificity of habituation and on the effects of stimulus miscuing cast doubt on the usefulness of an associative analysis as a general account of habituation phenomena. Nevertheless, the weight of evidence seems to indicate that an adequate theory of human habituation must include a comparison process and must acknowledge that orienting and habituation involve a re-allocation of attentional resources.
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Much that has been written about the concept, operation, and performance of HMOs--their use of resources compared with other health service systems--masks the real differences among HMOs themselves. Investigation of autonomous units within a unified HMO program shows a surprising diversity. Analytic formulations drawn from long-term and large-scale research fail to account for variations in staffing, budgeting, rate setting, and expansion when applied to institutional research. Judgment of intangibles remains a key aspect of most major decisions.
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