Reflections on Health Law and Ethics

Extract

Major changes are occurring in health law and ethics. Not only are new questions being asked, but new answers are being given, sometimes by new participants. The ferment of the field was very evident during London ‘89, the Second International Conference on Health Law and Ethics, as I hope readers can discern from the essays in this journal. Traditional issues remain, but new themes—such as the place of community welfare alongside values like promoting patient autonomy and serving justice—have emerged with great urgency because of the AIDS epidemic and the constraints on health care spending. Economists and health care planners are looking beyond technical responses and participating more actively in bioethical debates, even as the field seems to be of greater interest to Europeans, Japanese, and people from developing countries, who include a larger number of government officials than is true in most settings in the United States.