here is a health policy riddle: despite the fact that we are not always clear as to what we are trying to achieve, even on the most basic level, we must make policy anyway. odder still: this is as we might expect it to be, and perhaps even as it should be. after all, part of what makes health policy important is precisely the fact that it raises critical questions about our most basic human val...

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Palliative care serves both as an integrated part of treatment and as a last effort to care for those we cannot cure. The extent to which palliative care should be provided and our reasons for doing so have been curiously overlooked in the debate about distributive justice in health and healthcare. We argue that one prominent approach, the Rawlsian approach developed by Norman Daniels, is unabl...

Norman Daniels, in applying Rawls' theory of justice to the issue of human health, ideally presupposes that society exists in a state of moderate scarcity. However, faced with problems like climate change, many societies find that their state of moderate scarcity is increasingly under threat. The first part of this essay aims to determine the consequences for Daniels' theory of just health when...

Without social justice, we cannot promote population health nor a universal public health system necessary to support it. In the words of Norman Daniels “social justice is good for our health.”1 Catholic social teaching has important insights to contribute to the social justice debate in health and public health care. Drawing upon this tradition, I will explore the concepts of justice and the c...

Buchanan examines, and finds inadequate, several philosophical approaches to justifying and specifying the content of a universal right to a decent minimum of health care: utilitarian arguments, Rawlsian ideal contract arguments, and Norman Daniels' equality of opportunity argument. Also rejecting the libertarian hypothesis that there is no right to a decent minimum of care, he contends that t...