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Results for “Commodification”

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At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1999

Biotechnology and commodification within health care.

The biotechnology industry's intellectual property claims contribute to a subtle but not insignificant encroachment of commodification within health care. Drawing on the conceptual framework of Margaret Jane Radin, I argue that patent claims on human biological materials may commodify that with which our personhood and individuality is intertwined but that such commodification is broad and incomplete. Patents on nonhuman biological organisms contribute to a more materialistic understanding of them but do not significantly change our relationship to them. The systemic effects of biotechnology's commodification within health care are various and may compromise the goal of good health. The morally problematic aspects of patent claims entail certain obligations to inhibit commodification from becoming more egregious, but on balance, those aspects are currently insufficient to justify denying the benefits the patent system promotes.

Biomedical Research↗
PubMed1999

The commodification of medical and health care: the moral consequences of a paradigm shift from a professional to a market ethic.

Commodification of health care is a central tenet of managed care as it functions in the United States. As a result, price, cost, quality, availability, and distribution of health care are increasingly left to the workings of the competitive marketplace. This essay examines the conceptual, ethical, and practical implications of commodification, particularly as it affects the healing relationship between health professionals and their patients. It concludes that health care is not a commodity, that treating it as such is deleterious to the ethics of patient care, and that health is a human good that a good society has an obligation to protect from the market ethos.

Beneficence↗
PubMed1998

The commodification of human reproductive materials.

This essay develops a framework for thinking about the moral basis for the commodification of human reproductive materials. It argues that selling and buying gametes and genes is morally acceptable although there should not be a market for zygotes, embryos, or genomes. Also a market in gametes and genes should be regulated in order to address concerns about the adverse social consequences of commodification.

Commerce↗
PubMed1987

Reproductive technology and the commodification of life.

This paper suggests that the key unifying concept in the development and application of new reproduction technology has been the increasing commodification of life--treating people and parts of people as marketable commodities. This commodification process is made most dramatically clear in (1) prenatal diagnosis, in which the fetus is treated as a product subject to quality control measures and women are treated as producers without emotional tie to their products and (2) in so-called "surrogacy" arrangements in which an actual price tag is placed on pregnancy, and women sell both their "labor" and their "product."

Attitude to Health↗
PubMed1998

On the commodification of medicine.

The author reviews key themes of medicine and medical education in the 20th century, such as the revolution in therapies and the consequent and continuing changes in the economics of health care; workforce issues, including the controversy over the optimum number of residency slots; and the impact of managed care on teaching hospitals and medical schools. This impact is part of "the commodification of health care," in which health care is beginning to be bought and sold in a market, where prices determine outcomes, and where the not-for-profit, service orientation of health care providers is threatened. He discusses in detail the pressures this new health care environment places on medical schools and teaching hospitals, and recounts the first Senate Finance Committee hearing in April 1994 on the subject of academic health centers under health care reform. Soon after, the Committee approved legislation to create the Graduate Medical Education and Academic Health Center Trust Fund, to be financed by a 1.5% tax on private health care premiums in addition to Medicare Graduate Medical Education payments. The provision was later dropped from a similar bill that came before the full Senate, but has since been introduced as the Medical Education Trust Fund Act of 1997. The author concludes by cautioning that matters will grow more difficult in the near future, since the threats to academic medicine's institutions have not yet become part of the national political agenda.

Academic Medical Centers↗
PubMed1989

A question of medicine answering. Health commodification and the social relations of healing in Sri Lanka.

Biomedicine although institutionally powerful in Sri Lanka has not been able to depersonalize illness or promote a notion of treatment efficacy disconnected from social relations. An ideology of healing crosscuts the trend toward health commodification. This paper focuses on three concepts fundamental to the interactive dynamics of treatment efficacy: constitution, habit, and power of the hand. A movement between two distinct types of health care seeking behavior is described. One is inspired by finding the right medicine fix, the other by finding a practitioner having a sensitivity toward one's sense of person and all this entails.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1989

The commodification of American health care.

Since 1980, cost containment efforts have radically transformed the delivery of medical services in the United States. The number and diversity of private, for-profit delivery systems have significantly increased and so has the competition among them. Some Marxists have conceptualized these changes as a transition from a non-commodity to a commodity form of medical care. They have labeled this the process of 'commodification' of medical services. However, this paper demonstrates that this process took place over 50 years ago. In light of this historical finding, an alternative Marxian analysis of the current medical conjuncture is briefly presented. Several of the key attractions of this approach are discussed.

American Medical Association↗
PubMed1997

The commodification of specialty nurse education.

The nexus between tertiary nursing education and employment was strengthened during the 1990s when universities became involved in delivering a plethora of specialty graduate certificates and diplomas which largely replaced hospital-based post-registration courses. These university-based courses can be seen as contributing to the commodification of education as well as the legitimisation of a stratification of nursing knowledge through which biological sciences and experiential knowledge remain privileged. In the development of specialist nurse education courses, it is vital there is an accompanying examination of whose interests are being served by the models adopted. In particular, there is a need to contest the dominance of service needs in shaping nurse education. Rather than continuing to respond with uncritical acceptance of courses that are characteristically highly technical and vocational in nature, nursing needs to explore curriculum models that enable students to choose their course pathways to develop their practice. It is argued that nurse academics are complicit in reproducing power relations which continue to subjugate nurses within medical and economic discourses.

Curriculum↗
PubMed1995

Commercial surrogacy and the commodification of children: an ethical perspective.

The aim of this article is to establish whether there is anything intrinsically immoral about surrogacy arrangements from the perspective of the children born from such arrangements. We focus on the claim that surrogacy entails the wrongful commodification or transfer of children, thereby degrading them and disrespecting their inherent moral value as individual human beings.

Bioethics↗
PubMed1999

More questions than answers: the commodification of health care.

The changing world of health care finance has led to a paradigm shift in health care with health care being viewed more and more as a commodity. Many have argued that such a paradigm shift is incompatible with the very nature of medicine and health care. But such arguments raise more questions than they answer. There are important assumptions about basic concepts of health care and markets that frame such arguments.

Commerce↗
PubMed1998

Geneticizing disability: the Human Genome Project and the commodification of self.

This article explores the potential impact upon people with disability of some of the technological information being uncovered by the Human Genome Project. While the project has been promoted as promising positive benefits to society, its effect, in our present values climate, is potentially damaging. While we can map impairment, we cannot, as yet, cure it. And, in a society which embraces values such as utilitarianism and economic rationalism, we are choosing more and more to eliminate rather than care. We are seeing a conceptual transformation--the geneticization of self--which has enormous implications for the lives of people with disability. The author argues that scientific endeavor, which has been constructed as occurring within a culture of impartiality and empiricism, actually operates within an uncontested value base which devalues disability. She concludes that the Human Genome Project needs to be reframed within a broadened ethical framework of inclusion.

Attitude to Health↗
PubMed1994

Gender differences in tobacco use and the commodification of tobacco in Central Borneo.

Historical and anthropological studies of non-Western societies have concluded that there is no cultural group in which the use of tobacco is substantially more common among women, although there are societies without appreciable gender differences in tobacco use. Interpretations of this pattern, influenced by well-documented changes in the United States, have concentrated on the greater use of tobacco by men, attributing it to aspects of traditional sex roles such as male power and male control of scarce resources. This analysis places more weight on the changes in both sex roles and local economies which accompany the transition from subsistence-orientated production to a market economy. Among the Lahanan, a relatively isolated group of horticulturalists living in Central Borneo, adult women, who control the production and distribution of tobacco, are more likely than men to smoke are also heavier smokers. Increasing contact with the industrialised world is rapidly changing this pattern with young men switching to manufactured cigarettes and the better educated of the young women not smoking at all. This study suggests that gender differences in tobacco use are probably inconsequential in societies where tobacco is grown for home consumption, but become increasingly substantial as manufactured cigarettes replace local tobacco products.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1998

Radio and the commodification of natural medicine in Ecuador.

This paper explores the discourse that is being created around medical commodities in one Ecuadorian city in an effort to understand how desire for new medical products is generated and sustained. Commercial natural medicine, which includes vitamins, herbal remedies and tonics is a relatively new addition to the medical marketplace in Ecuador, yet the popularity of these products seems to be growing rapidly. Much of the success of natural medicines is due to promotional campaigns, most notably radio programs, that emphasize and manipulate, important cultural themes about the body, identity, morality and social success. Although on the surface natural medicine seems to be creating a radically new discourse about the body and illness causation, that discourse ultimately serves only to reinforce the unequal social relations associated with capitalist marketplaces.

Advertising↗