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QJM Advance Access published online on December 17, 2006
QJM, doi:10.1093/qjmed/hcl130
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Physicians. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

The moral foundations of health insurance

J.P. Ruger

From the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, USA

Address correspondence to A/Prof. J.P. Ruger, Yale University School of Medicine, Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, 60 College Street, New Haven, CT 06525, USA. email: jennifer.ruger@yale.edu

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.


   Introduction
 
The US and numerous developing countries do not provide universal health insurance coverage to their populations. Academic approaches to health insurance1 have typically adopted a neo-classical economic perspective, assuming that individuals make rational decisions to maximize their preferred outcomes, and businesses (including insurance companies) make rational decisions to maximize profits. In this approach, individuals who are risk-averse will purchase health insurance to reduce variation in the costs of health care between healthy and sick periods.2 In empirical studies, however, individuals do not always make rational choices. They also find it difficult to assess their health risks and to know how much insurance they need.3

By contrast, medical ethics has focused on the issue of equal access to health care, but provided little in the way of philosophical justification for risk management through health insurance per se. Nor has it shown how the practice whereby many at-risk individuals pay premiums . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   Theory of demand for health insurance
 

   Behavioural economics and prospect theory
 

   Medical ethics and equal access to health care
 

   Welfare economics and the capability approach
 

   Vulnerability and insecurity
 

   Moral foundations of health insurance
 

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Home page
 Journal of Health Politics, Policy and LawHome page
J. P. Ruger
Health, Health Care, and Incompletely Theorized Agreements: A Normative Theory of Health Policy Decision Making
Journal of Health Politics Policy and Law, February 1, 2007; 32(1): 51 - 87.
[Abstract] [PDF]