Issues surrounding health care are particularly volatile in today's culture — not least because of the growing realization that (1) everyone has a basic right to health care and (2) we simply don't have the resources to provide for everyone's health care needs.
Camosy's work in medical ethics attempts to move beyond the right/left polarization on this issue by directly addressing the most difficult and emotional questions:
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What counts as a basic level of care?
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Should we have a preferential option for the poor when distributing these resources?
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What role should the market play in distribution?
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How can we make sure vulnerable populations (seniors, prenatal children, disabled persons, racial minorities, LGBT persons, etc.) are fully protected from discrimination as we consider how to justly allocate scarce medical resources?
Just Distribution of Health Care
Camosy's experience in medical ethics:
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Ethics advisor for New York Presbyterian Children's Hospital
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Clinical Ethics Practicum: Center for the Study of Bioethcis, Medical College of Wisconsin
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Research involving rounding with NICU medical teams at Yale, University of Chicago, Medical College of Wisconsin, Groningen University (Netherlands), among others
Reviews:
Media
The San Francisco Chronicle | Oct. 2, 2009
We are in the morally tragic situation of having no choice but to ration care-something which happens each day in this country already. Medicaid, for instance, currently does not pay anywhere near the total bill. Its reimbursement rate for prenatal care, for instance, is so poor (in many cases around 30 percent) that OB/GYN physicians who take pregnant women on Medicaid are often nowhere to be found. We should, no doubt, object to certain kinds of rationing methods. But the solution cannot be to pretend to avoid rationing. Even our private insurance companies ration care - and often based on morally repugnant criteria like preexisting conditions and ability to pay. (More)
The Huffington Post | Oct. 24, 2011
On Faith | Jan. 26, 2011
It’s coming. Health care reform, Round II.
Republicans pledged to do it as part of their manifesto during the midterm election campaigns. And House Speaker John Boehner, less than a day after the elections, vowed that the GOP would “do everything we can to try to repeal this bill and replace it with common sense reforms to bring down the cost of health care.” (More)
Bakground photo by Jacoplane's parents, via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-3.0