Level-headedness, fairness and courageous civility - On the scarcity of resources in the health services - A reply

The scarcity of goods in one of the central problems medical ethics has to deal with. scarcity results from the connection of a natural lack of goods and human "pleonexia", i.e. the desire always to wish for more. The old and the new answer on the problem of pleonexia is temperance which in the heal th care system could prove itself by considerately dealing with a permanent ly growing measure of different medical treatments. But since individual te mperance can not be generally guaranteed, the question of justice, of a jus t organization of the health care system remains to be answered. A fair wei ghing of goods, to give a concrete example, is necessary in order to clarif y which significance the health care system ought to have in politics, comp ared with other political topics, for example education. Moreover it is nec essary to know for which of the possible medical treatments there exists a just claim for everybody. for this reason a model of health care insurance with different stages is considered.