Socio-economics and the Welfare Principle with respect to America’s Medical Attention

21 March 2007

The Welfare Principle can be applied in the case of the student who writes a justification for redistributing the American government’s expenditure on social insurance. The principle addresses the issue of the population’s economic gap where only a few people can afford state-of-the-art medical technologies and the majority can afford mediocre or no medical care at all because of rising medical insurance costs. An enormous sum of money is spent during the moments just before an individual’s death because the cost of equipment, technology, and training to delay death increases exponentially as one approaches the moment of death. Furthermore, issues surrounding death are such hot topics in bioethics, medical research, and technological development. As a result, more and more funding is clustered around the fertile soil of death and its ‘prevention’. However, the socio-economic implications of translating death into technology and bioethics are often ignored as more expensive technologies promising a tiny life extension are reared.

The rising cost of medical treatment complicates the lives of Americans with less income. The Welfare Principle can be applied to end-of-life decisions with the distribution of government spending. By limiting a dieing individual’s opportunity of medical treatment which delays inevitable death, funding for medical care may be dispersed over the population promising more people better care throughout the duration of life. The medical needs of the majority of Americans rise because we are born into a situation which grants us less autonomy due to the disproportional distribution of labor over leisure time, as well as the rising costs of medical insurance which keeps us at work. Theses needs could be met if money was allocated towards medical technologies improving life rather than the expensive development of technologies that avoid death. America would gain more autonomy with better health care during the course of life at the expense of a tiny number of people whose enormous wealth and attention from medical technologies delaying death gains them autonomy.