Health, Justice, and Fairness

This work endeavors to show that the American system of health care violates any conception of distributive justice understood as equality of opportunity. The American system of care fails to provide equal access to medical providers through a lack of universal insurance, a consumer driven conception of quality, and a system wide focus on cost control, leaving millions of Americans exposed to the ravages of disease. However, if health is understood as an antecedent for one's ability to function across a number of categories that have been objectively deemed as vital to engage in a life that is fully human, than the commitment our nation has to the protection of fair equality of opportunity, established by our adoption of a Rawlsian conception of justice, necessitates a revision of our national health policy. This work will articulate this argument by reconstructing and synthesizing precepts from the contemporary philosophical sources and then applying these to the practical workings of the system at large, while concurrently demonstrating that a system of distributive justice is compatible with the creation of a universal system of health care.