Prudential Insurance and Equity in Health Coverage
Prudential insurance is a concept that, if implemented, will provide the best and most equitable health coverage (Dworkin 246). It promotes equity in health-care coverage, allowing disadvantaged people to be treated equally to wealthy people. It also has a proclivity for advocating for high-quality health care. The ideal, according to Dworkin, is perfect for any American.
Challenges in Achieving Equity
That is not easy to accomplish in real life. The obvious disparity in wealth is one explanation why the ideal cannot succeed. Resources have often been unequally distributed and obtained since the dawn of time. Hospitals and nursing homes are stronger and more plentiful in some regions of the United States than in others. People in these various areas automatically get different health care provisions. Where there are few hospitals, you expect congestion of patients. Doctors and other care providers still prefer urban areas than working in far-flung places. Those far-flung places find it hard to get specialists in their local hospitals. To get their services, they must incur extra costs of going to where they practice. In his book, Dworkin acts like the proverbial ostrich and assumes that the inequality in resources will simply disappear into thin air. It is not so!
Education and Its Impact on Health Care
Regarding education levels, it is a web of complexities. Educated people tend to know where they are ailing from or have a clue. For uneducated people, they leave it to the doctor to diagnose them and recommend the type of treatment required. When faced with complex medical procedures, their decision making is almost inexistent. Educated people often have personal or family doctors. They always consult them when faced with a medical dilemma. The ignorance makes health care providers liaising with their hospitals to charger higher fees than allowed to make a kill from the insurance companies. All this happens without considering whether the procedure is safe or not. They always consult them when faced with a medical dilemma. I greatly differ with Dworkin when he alleges that everyone has the same level of knowledge about their health problems and medical procedures. It can never be possible. Variations must exist in literacy and knowledge levels in a normal population. If it were otherwise, doctors would not need to specialize as they would all have similar skills as alleged by Dworkin.
Contradictions and Awareness
He further contradicts himself in his support of his ideal. The contradiction comes when he quips that nobody has information about the possibility of acquiring a disease. I think this is where his ideal completely goes off track. In these technological advancement times, only the most ignorant people do not know what is going on in the world of medicine. With the rise in chronic and sexually transmitted diseases, awareness creation is high. The Centre for Disease Control is always at the forefront creating awareness about diseases. The awareness involves how the various diseases are acquired, transmitted and their prevention. Some of these things even talk to students in fourth grade to mitigate their spread. Dworkin claiming ignorance is crucial for his ideal to work is laughable. Every American who has gone to school and all have, albeit to different levels knows or has a slight clue about at least one disease. A click of the phone goes a long way in expounding about a certain condition.
The Siamese Twins Dilemma
In the case of the Siamese twins in Philadelphia, I go against Dworkin once again. I fully support the rescue ideal. If those twins who happened to share one heart were allowed to live like that, theirs would be a world of misery. Their immunity would have been low and therefore contracting diseases easy. All are knowing the fact that surviving like that would be debatable still. The doctors carried out the operation to try and save the life of one of them knowing the other would die (Dworkin 247). However, to be fair to Dworkin, he was not against the procedure due to its risky nature but due to the cost incurred by Indiana and the hospital where the surgery took place. The cost was an estimated one million dollars that Dworkin believes could have used in other ways in the healthcare system. To him, it is not justifiable for one procedure to cost all that money.
All in all, the prudential ideal should not go to total waste as some of the principles pioneered are beneficial to the public. It has some of the best health care principles, which are beneficial to the sector. For example, Dworkin is against the government through an agency limiting choices for the patients. He says that would be giving that agency power, almost equal to choosing life and death for some patients (Dworkin 245). He is also justified to lash out at doctors who he says are the best paid compared to other nations but end up providing lip services. He says they are never concerned with quality health provision (Dworkin 246). He also decries the wastage and corruption in the health sector. In fact, his ideal seeks to reduce funding to the sector to be on par with other nations. The reduced funding will help bring sanity in the sector.
Work Cited
Dworkin, Ronald Myles. “Justice and the High Cost of Health Care.” Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality, Harvard Univ. Press, 2000, pp. 240-247. Print.
