PHIL 235 BIOMEDICAL ETHICS 2026 EXAMINERS
SET QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SURE A+
✔✔Is there a right to Health care - Allen Buchanan - ✔✔- hypothesis: advocates of a
coercively backed decent minimum have operated on the assumption that such a policy
must be based on a universal right to a decent minimum. (author says false)
- He suggests a general consensus can be found on a claim that everybody has a right
to a decent minimum of health care but most disagree on what that decent minimum is.
He also states that it's tied to a general theory of justice.
- Just because we can know what a decent minimum is doesn't give us a reason to think
it's a right.
- Minimum is also relative and also indicates that all should have access. Should we all
be forced to take the minimum
- Rights can't be suspended even on basis of utilitarianism (westboro Baptist cant be
shut up)
-strong equal access principle = everyone has an equal right to the best health care
services available
✔✔Primary objective of Canadian Health care - ✔✔To protect, promote and restore the
physical and mental well being of residents of Canada and to facilitate reasonable
access to health services without financial or other barriers
, ✔✔Five general policies of Health care act - ✔✔1. Public administration: system run by
public officials NPO basis
2. Comprehensiveness: In that all necessary services be provided
3. Universality: In that all residents entitled to equal coverage
4. Portability: Residents traveling in Canada have coverage
5. Accessibility: all insured people have reasonable access
✔✔Managing Care the Canadian way - Pat Armstrong - ✔✔- Introduces several kinds of
consideration of how the Canadian system has adopted American stuff.
- Managed care where competition, financial incentives are primary methods to cut cost.
- Us method would not solve issues with Canadian system he says because the US
system has "not controlled costs, reduced the volume and intensity or service use or
increased access and quality" Where as medicare in Canada marked the end of rapid
cost escalation.
- Pat argues, the Canadian system is not perfect but it has developed a system that
provides equitable access for many more people to far better care than managed care
has provided the United States with less bureaucracy, more choice, and lower cost
✔✔The commodification of Medical and Health Care - Edmund Pellegrino - ✔✔is health
care a commodity? Are physicians healers first or money makers?
- Pellegrino suggests there are market forces that encourage medical students to
pursue economic advantage first and the art of medicine and community second.
- Years ago Plato talked about this question but showed the opposite.
He says health care is not a commodity, the impacts of commodification are negative,
commodification does not deliver its promises in terms of quality and lowered costs
through competition and health care is a universal human need and a common good
that we have equal claim over.
✔✔Rationing health care by age FOR - Alan Williams - ✔✔- We don't have enough
resources for all medical care. Average per patient cost increases dramatically after 65
as we get sick more and don't recover. Putting every last effort into extra minutes of life
is not the hallmark of a humane society and fails to let patients come to terms with
death.
- From my perspective 70 year old, I see why it's a tragedy because someone who dies
young has been denied the opportunities that we older people already had. If reducing
inequalities in lifetime health is a worthy social objective, it will lead us to be willing to do
more to help young survive than we do for old people to survive. (WILLIAMS)
- Fair innings a sports metaphor. Everyone should have the short we all did at health.
✔✔Should Alcoholics compete equally for liver transplants- ALVIN MOSS MARK
SIEGLER - ✔✔- it's a non renewable resource, if people who drink compete with those
who don't we already don't have enough
- Their view: In view of distinctive circumstance we propose that ARESLD should not
compete equally with other candidates. We do not suggest they should never receive
liver transplants but rather they should be ranked lower on the list.
- Two objections: Alcoholism as a disease, they treat other conditions that are self made
SET QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SURE A+
✔✔Is there a right to Health care - Allen Buchanan - ✔✔- hypothesis: advocates of a
coercively backed decent minimum have operated on the assumption that such a policy
must be based on a universal right to a decent minimum. (author says false)
- He suggests a general consensus can be found on a claim that everybody has a right
to a decent minimum of health care but most disagree on what that decent minimum is.
He also states that it's tied to a general theory of justice.
- Just because we can know what a decent minimum is doesn't give us a reason to think
it's a right.
- Minimum is also relative and also indicates that all should have access. Should we all
be forced to take the minimum
- Rights can't be suspended even on basis of utilitarianism (westboro Baptist cant be
shut up)
-strong equal access principle = everyone has an equal right to the best health care
services available
✔✔Primary objective of Canadian Health care - ✔✔To protect, promote and restore the
physical and mental well being of residents of Canada and to facilitate reasonable
access to health services without financial or other barriers
, ✔✔Five general policies of Health care act - ✔✔1. Public administration: system run by
public officials NPO basis
2. Comprehensiveness: In that all necessary services be provided
3. Universality: In that all residents entitled to equal coverage
4. Portability: Residents traveling in Canada have coverage
5. Accessibility: all insured people have reasonable access
✔✔Managing Care the Canadian way - Pat Armstrong - ✔✔- Introduces several kinds of
consideration of how the Canadian system has adopted American stuff.
- Managed care where competition, financial incentives are primary methods to cut cost.
- Us method would not solve issues with Canadian system he says because the US
system has "not controlled costs, reduced the volume and intensity or service use or
increased access and quality" Where as medicare in Canada marked the end of rapid
cost escalation.
- Pat argues, the Canadian system is not perfect but it has developed a system that
provides equitable access for many more people to far better care than managed care
has provided the United States with less bureaucracy, more choice, and lower cost
✔✔The commodification of Medical and Health Care - Edmund Pellegrino - ✔✔is health
care a commodity? Are physicians healers first or money makers?
- Pellegrino suggests there are market forces that encourage medical students to
pursue economic advantage first and the art of medicine and community second.
- Years ago Plato talked about this question but showed the opposite.
He says health care is not a commodity, the impacts of commodification are negative,
commodification does not deliver its promises in terms of quality and lowered costs
through competition and health care is a universal human need and a common good
that we have equal claim over.
✔✔Rationing health care by age FOR - Alan Williams - ✔✔- We don't have enough
resources for all medical care. Average per patient cost increases dramatically after 65
as we get sick more and don't recover. Putting every last effort into extra minutes of life
is not the hallmark of a humane society and fails to let patients come to terms with
death.
- From my perspective 70 year old, I see why it's a tragedy because someone who dies
young has been denied the opportunities that we older people already had. If reducing
inequalities in lifetime health is a worthy social objective, it will lead us to be willing to do
more to help young survive than we do for old people to survive. (WILLIAMS)
- Fair innings a sports metaphor. Everyone should have the short we all did at health.
✔✔Should Alcoholics compete equally for liver transplants- ALVIN MOSS MARK
SIEGLER - ✔✔- it's a non renewable resource, if people who drink compete with those
who don't we already don't have enough
- Their view: In view of distinctive circumstance we propose that ARESLD should not
compete equally with other candidates. We do not suggest they should never receive
liver transplants but rather they should be ranked lower on the list.
- Two objections: Alcoholism as a disease, they treat other conditions that are self made
