Utilitarianism in Health Care

Utilitarianism in Healthcare

Introduction

Ethics is concerned with prescribing and describing moral requirements and behaviors of a person. There are acceptable and unacceptable behaviors. People and organizations exist within a code of ethics. However, this code of ethics is framed by the culture in which the people and organizations exist. In some cultures, it is totally acceptable in a business environment to offer bribes, and accept bribes. In American culture, this behavior is considered unethical. Some organizations think their American code of ethics is the only acceptable behavior and other behaviors, regardless of culture, are unacceptable (Hanson, 2001). The biggest challenge about health institutions is how to finance and manage resources health from an ethical perspective. In other words, healthcare providers need to balance the demands of justice care with limited resources. One of the components that determine the state of health care is medical ethics, which plays a very important role in the daily treatment and preventive activities carried out in health care. Integrity and objectivity of health problems, including ethical issues, are possible only when there is a comparative assessment of the positive and negative trends in the world. Medical ethics, culture, morality to a large extent faced by practitioners in health care, and these elements sometimes are leveled, and sometimes their importance is minimized, especially in the process of rapid development of health care as a sector. In this paper I am going to evaluate the theory of Utilitarianism in Healthcare as ethics in healthcare is playing a very important role.

Discussion

A health care systems, is developed and designed to fulfill the health related need of the target population with the help of the organization of institutions, people and resources. In some countries the health care system constitutes the organizations and institution in the market. In many responsible countries the health care planning and execution involves government, religious, charities, trade unions, or other co-coordinating bodies. The health system is faced with challenges of accessibility and allocation (Lamont, 2002). The people, who do not have insurance coverage, find them really hard to obtain the health care services. The resources allocated for the health care sector as per plans and insurance companies take some load of the government. The ethical issue being of allocating of resources to appropriate area has been under debate and is reviewed from time to time.

Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is a form of consequentialism: it evaluates an action (or rule) only by its consequences, mainly distinguishes many moral type of conduct, such as Kantianism, to which morality should be evaluated independently of its consequences. We can summarize the heart of the utilitarian doctrine by the phrase "always act so as to result in the highest quality of happiness (principle of maximum happiness). It is therefore a moral eudemonistic, but the opposite of selfishness, insists that we must consider the welfare of all and not the welfare of single agent actor. Utilitarianism applied to the field of health care, Utilitarianism is basically a very broad topic to be summarized ...