Health Reform in America: The Mystery of the Missing Moral Momentum

Abstract

Examining health policy and its recent reform misadventures in the United States from a moral viewpoint is painful. That the nation devotes 14% of its Gross Domestic Product to health services—sometimes of doubtful clinical efficacy and value for money—and yet lets more than 40 million citizens go without health coverage strikes critics, both foreign and domestic, as a disgrace explicable only by ethical deficiencies distinctive to the American value system. There is certainly merit in this critique, which understandably incites fire and brimstone about the urgent moral imperative of getting the nation on the path of righteousness at last.