The United States has a market-based, capitalist system, which means market forces—including the profit motives of corporate interests—can shape the delivery of and payment for medical services. Read about this quintessentially American topic and its implications for medical ethics.
The August issue of the AMA Journal of Ethics examines how the market orientation of the U.S. system influences medical education and physicians’ relationships with drug and device manufacturers. It also examines the market-based system’s influence on the availability of drugs, patients’ access to care, the types of treatment prescribed and what happens when patients can’t pay for care.
This issue also includes an opportunity to receive continuing medical education credit. Read “Medicine’s valuing of ‘normal’ cognitive ability” and complete a quiz to receive one AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™.
The issue features:
- “Medicine and the market.” In taking for granted that the U.S. health care system is market-based, we sometimes overlook the ethics problems created by the profit motive in medicine. The issue editor discusses how these ethics issues can appear as soon as medical students start their education.
- “Money and medicine: Indivisible and irreconcilable.” Physicians deserve payment for their services, but to some, the thought of medicine as a road to personal wealth is an example of the free market gone awry. This author examines the ethical issues arising from the inextricability of money and medicine.
- “The all-payer rate-setting model.” The all-payer rate-setting model improves price transparency for patients and can eliminate variation in payments, thereby improving access to care. This author examines the pros and cons of this and other payer models.
More ethics news
Current U.S. medical students have until Oct. 12 to submit their responses for the Journal of Ethics John Conley Ethics Essay Contest. The author of the best essay receives $5,000, and authors of up to three runner-up essays could receive $1,000 prizes. Winning essays are published in the AMA Journal of Ethics.
