Medical ethics and physician motivations.

Autor: Andrews BP; University of Alberta, Canada. Electronic address: bpandrews@ualberta.ca.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Journal of health economics [J Health Econ] 2024 Dec; Vol. 98, pp. 102933. Date of Electronic Publication: 2024 Sep 30.
DOI: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2024.102933
Abstrakt: This paper provides an institutional economics framework for analyzing medical ethics. An ethical policy partitions the set of physician actions into (un)ethical subsets, with unethical actions then unavailable. Individual physicians' preferences over policies combined with a political process determine equilibrium constraints. I show that physicians' concern for colleagues' patients uniquely motivates their support for ethics which restrict behavior under strong assumptions. Without these assumptions, even identical physicians might ban actions they would otherwise select for reasons varying from protecting patients to differences in the costs of maintaining ethical policies. Interestingly, heightened altruism for colleagues' patients makes the former reasoning less credible. Novel applications for 'Provide Free Care to Physicians' and 'Duty to Treat in a Pandemic' demonstrate: (i) rising physician income can explain long-run weakening of both formal ethics in the United States; and (ii) the duty to treat can deteriorate as fewer physicians are required to improve pandemic outcomes.
Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
(Copyright © 2024 The Author. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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