Ethical Issues In Health Care

Throughout the world, there is a shortage of scarce medical resources, which are those life-saving resources which are in limited quantities in crisis-type situations. For example, emergency medical personnel, medications, and organs are scarce life-saving medical resources. During these crisis-type situations, there is an ethical debate on how to allocate these scarce medical resources to multiple patients. This paper will discuss two approaches to this debate. The first is to treat every patient equally in receiving the life-saving resources. The other approach is to prioritize the life-saving resources to save the most number of patients. This paper will support the latter of the two positions. This paper will begin with the opposing argument, …show more content…
If patients are in equal dire need of life-saving treatment, then they should all have an equal chance of being saved, otherwise, it would be unfair to all the patients who have a lower priority. For example, every patient who is put at a lower priority would have less access to the scarce organs than the person in front of them. As well, the person in front would have an unfair advantage, because they have more access to the organs than everyone else. Thus, almost every patient would be violated of their equal and fair chance at receiving the organs that they need. Thus, there should be no prior claim based on prioritization because it would be morally impermissible to do so. In regards to Davis, if prioritization to utilize the organs to save the most number of patients it can be reasonably inferred that Davis would be placed last. In essence, Davis’s bad luck of having multiple organ failures would be the basis of her given the lowest priority furthering her bad …show more content…
An analogy between the following example of Davis is that the scarce medical resource will be time and emergency personnel instead of organs. Consider a case where three patients are brought in from a shooting incident and one patient is brought in from a car accident. All these patients are in equal dire need to see a doctor in the shortest amount go time, otherwise, they will die. The doctor could either choose to treat the shooting incident patients first or the car accident patient first. Prioritization would weight each life equally, therefore, the doctor should spend his time saving the three shooting patients rather than the one-car accident patient. As this would result in a net gain of two lives saved keeping with the principle of saving lives. However, the doctor would be violating the principle of saving lives if he were to save the car accident victim, as it would result in a net loss of two patients saved. It would certainly not be morally impermissible to save the life of the patient from the car accident, but like the organ scenario, it would be violating the principle of life the medical industry is thought to follow as it would be treating the life of the car accident as three-more times important. Therefore, prioritization is needed to ensure that the scarce medical resources can be distributed in a way to maximize the number of lives saved and be an

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