- Read Luke 14:13. What does the text have to say about health care in the Catholic tradition?
- What are some of the most important challenges to the delivery of health care? Include in your discussion economic, legal, political, medical, and ethical challenges.
- In discussions of the delivery of health care, the question as to whether health care ought to be regarded as a right or as a commodity if often raised. Assess the proffered disjunction and offer an appropriate approach to the distribution of health care.
- If health care is a scarce or limited resource, how, given human nature, can we best deal with its limitations?
- Return to the distinction between ordinary care and extraordinary care found in Directives 56 and 57 in Part Five, "Issues in Care for the Dying," of the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services. How does this distinction serve to guide the use of medical interventions?
- Medical resources have as their primary application (a) to cure illness, (b) to assuage suffering, and (c) to compensate for disability. Assess the restrictions that ought to apply to both individuals and to the medical profession in the use of the limited resources of medicine.
- How ought individuals and the medical profession respond to the use of the art of medicine to serve the desire for human enhancement?
- What considerations are significant in order to put into place appropriate structures to serve the health care needs of citizens?
- Read Catholic Health Care Institutions: Dinosaurs Awaiting Extinction or Safe Refuge in a Culture of Death. What significant points are made as to how Catholic health care can provide witness to the values it holds in the contemporary world?
_________________________________________________________________________________________
Medical Ethics - Study Materials
