Federalism and Responsibility for Health Care

Public Affairs Quarterly 30 (1):1-29 (2016)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Political philosophers often formulate the problem of distributive justice as the problem of how the government ought to distribute different types of goods—for example, income or health care—to its citizens. They therefore presuppose that the government is a unitary agent that governs its citizens directly. However, although a number of governments are unitary in this way, many are federations, exhibiting a division of sovereignty between two or more levels of government having independent grounds of authority. In contrast to unitary states, therefore, within a federation, two or more levels of government directly govern their citizens and are directly accountable to them. Because of the way in which different levels of government in a federation can separately affect the distribution of goods in society, federations face resource allocation problems that are far more complex than those of unitary states. In addition to determining what a just distribution of goods is, federations must also determine (1) whether distributive justice is a shared responsibility amongst different levels of government, and, if so, (2) how this shared responsibility should be allocated between them.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

  • This entry has no external links. Add one.
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

How devolution upsets distributive justice.Shlomi Segall - 2007 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 4 (2):257-272.
Beyond "Just Health Care".Allison Brooke Wolf - 2004 - Dissertation, Michigan State University
Human rights and distributive justice in health care delivery.R. L. Shelton - 1978 - Journal of Medical Ethics 4 (4):165-171.
Gender.Anca Gheaus - 2018 - In Serena Olsaretti (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Distributive Justice. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. pp. 389-414.
A Good Samaritan inspired foundation for a fair health care system.Elmar H. Frangenberg - 2011 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 14 (1):73-79.
Global Distributive Justice.Wilfried Hinsch - 2001 - Metaphilosophy 32 (1-2):58-78.
Vertical Equity in Health Care Resource Allocation.Gavin Mooney - 2000 - Health Care Analysis 8 (3):203-215.

Analytics

Added to PP
2016-02-24

Downloads
19 (#682,951)

6 months
1 (#1,040,386)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Douglas MacKay
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Citations of this work

COVID-19 and Health-Related Authority Allocation Puzzles.Michael da Silva - 2021 - Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 30 (1):25-36.
Federalism as an institutional doctrine.Michael Da Silva - 2023 - Journal of Social Philosophy 55 (1):81-105.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Distributive Justice, State Coercion, and Autonomy.Michael Blake - 2001 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 30 (3):257-296.
Fair Innings.Greg Bognar - 2014 - Bioethics 29 (4):251-261.
Authority.Tom Christiano - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Cost-Effectiveness and Disability Discrimination.Dan W. Brock - 2009 - Economics and Philosophy 25 (1):27-47.

View all 14 references / Add more references