IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/kap/theord/v78y2015i4p525-538.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Reconciling cost-effectiveness with the rule of rescue: the institutional division of moral labour

Author

Listed:
  • Shepley Orr
  • Jonathan Wolff

Abstract

Cost-effectiveness analysis suggests that a society should allocate its health care budget in order to achieve the greatest total health for its budget. However, in ‘rescue’ cases, where an individual’s life is in immediate peril, reasoning in terms of cost-effectiveness can appear inhumane. Hence considerations of cost-effectiveness and of rescue appear to be in tension. However, by attending to the division of labour in medical decision making it is possible to see how cost-effectiveness analysis and rescue-style reasoning are commonly combined in an ethically acceptable fashion. Copyright The Author(s) 2015

Suggested Citation

  • Shepley Orr & Jonathan Wolff, 2015. "Reconciling cost-effectiveness with the rule of rescue: the institutional division of moral labour," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 78(4), pages 525-538, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:kap:theord:v:78:y:2015:i:4:p:525-538
    DOI: 10.1007/s11238-014-9434-3
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11238-014-9434-3
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s11238-014-9434-3?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. McKie, John & Richardson, Jeff, 2003. "The Rule of Rescue," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 56(12), pages 2407-2419, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Robin Pope & Reinhard Selten & Johannes Kaiser & Sebastian Kube & Jürgen Hagen, 2012. "Exchange rate determination: a theory of the decisive role of central bank cooperation and conflict," International Economics and Economic Policy, Springer, vol. 9(1), pages 13-51, March.
    2. Richardson, Jeff & Sinha, Kompal & Iezzi, Angelo & Maxwell, Aimee, 2012. "Maximising health versus sharing: Measuring preferences for the allocation of the health budget," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 75(8), pages 1351-1361.
    3. David Canning, 2006. "The Economics of HIV/AIDS in Low-Income Countries: The Case for Prevention," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 20(3), pages 121-142, Summer.
    4. Erik Nord & Jose Luis Pinto & Jeff Richardson & Paul Menzel & Peter Ubel, 1999. "Incorporating societal concerns for fairness in numerical valuations of health programmes," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 8(1), pages 25-39, February.
    5. José‐Luis Pinto‐Prades & José‐María Abellán‐Perpiñán, 2005. "Measuring the health of populations: the veil of ignorance approach," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 14(1), pages 69-82, January.
    6. Roughead, Elizabeth Ellen & Gilbert, Andrew L. & Vitry, Agnes I., 2008. "The Australian funding debate on quadrivalent HPV vaccine: A case study for the national pharmaceutical policy," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 88(2-3), pages 250-257, December.
    7. Jan Abel Olsen & Jeff Richardson, 2013. "Preferences For The Normative Basis Of Health Care Priority Setting: Some Evidence From Two Countries," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 22(4), pages 480-485, April.
    8. Erik Nord & Paul Menzel & Jeff Richardson, 2003. "The value of life: individual preferences and social choice. A comment to Magnus Johannesson," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 12(10), pages 873-877, October.
    9. Richardson, Jeff & McKie, John, 2005. "Empiricism, ethics and orthodox economic theory: what is the appropriate basis for decision-making in the health sector?," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 60(2), pages 265-275, January.
    10. Whitty, Jennifer A. & Littlejohns, Peter, 2015. "Social values and health priority setting in Australia: An analysis applied to the context of health technology assessment," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 119(2), pages 127-136.
    11. Laura J. Damschroder & Todd R. Roberts & Brian J. Zikmund-Fisher & Peter A. Ubel, 2007. "Why People Refuse to Make Tradeoffs in Person Tradeoff Elicitations: A Matter of Perspective?," Medical Decision Making, , vol. 27(3), pages 266-280, May.
    12. James Hammitt & Nicolas Treich, 2007. "Statistical vs. identified lives in benefit-cost analysis," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 35(1), pages 45-66, August.
    13. Angermeyer, Matthias C. & Matschinger, Herbert & Link, Bruce G. & Schomerus, Georg, 2014. "Public attitudes regarding individual and structural discrimination: Two sides of the same coin?," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 103(C), pages 60-66.
    14. Michelle Imison & Simon Chapman, 2010. "‘Disease, Disaster and Despair’? The Presentation of Health in Low- and Middle-Income Countries on Australian Television," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 5(11), pages 1-5, November.
    15. E. Wetering & E. Stolk & N. Exel & W. Brouwer, 2013. "Balancing equity and efficiency in the Dutch basic benefits package using the principle of proportional shortfall," The European Journal of Health Economics, Springer;Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsökonomie (DGGÖ), vol. 14(1), pages 107-115, February.
    16. Dolan, Paul & Tsuchiya, Aki, 2005. "Health priorities and public preferences: the relative importance of past health experience and future health prospects," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 24(4), pages 703-714, July.
    17. Ingrid Miljeteig & Frehiwot Berhane Defaye & Paul Wakim & Dawit Neema Desalegn & Yemane Berhane & Ole Frithjof Norheim & Marion Danis, 2019. "Financial risk protection at the bedside: How Ethiopian physicians try to minimize out-of-pocket health expenditures," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(2), pages 1-16, February.
    18. Carlota Quintal, 2009. "Aversion to geographic inequality and geographic variation in preferences in the context of healthcare," Applied Health Economics and Health Policy, Springer, vol. 7(2), pages 121-136, June.
    19. Pace, Jessica & Ghinea, Narcyz & Kerridge, Ian & Lipworth, Wendy, 2018. "An ethical framework for the creation, governance and evaluation of accelerated access programs," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 122(9), pages 984-990.
    20. Ramon Abel Castano, 2006. "Los mandatos constitucionales sobre el derecho a la salud: implicaciones de equidad y eficiencia," Documentos de Trabajo 3173, Universidad del Rosario.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kap:theord:v:78:y:2015:i:4:p:525-538. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.