Health, economics and ethical reasoning

Excerpt

In the good old days of the late 1970s the Black Report (Socialist Health Association 1980) initiated a public debate in the United Kingdom and beyond on social gradients in health and health-care utilization. Two decades later the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health (Commission on Macroeconomics and Health 2005) reversed the classical notion of a flourishing economy as a precondition for an effective health-care system: healthy people are more productive than unhealthy people. In addition, it is considered that a modern, well-functioning health-care system could stimulate the economy especially under the auspices of the forthcoming common European market for health services (see the recent rulings of the European High Court on patient mobility). On the other hand, if more or less 10% of the GDP were to be spent on health services, as for example in Germany, efficient spending is mandatory to avoid a waste of limited resources which—in the long run—would damage the economy seriously. …