A theory of triage.

This paper provides a general framework for conceptualizing triage for intensive care unit admissions in public health emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic. It applies this framework to some of the guidelines issued during the pandemic and addresses some controversial issues, including the role of age, the use of lives or life years, and the relevance of quality of life considerations. The paper defends a view on which triage protocols for public health emergencies should aim to maximize the number of life years saved, may take into account age as a proxy, and should ignore quality of life considerations.

Rethinking patient involvement in healthcare priority setting.

With healthcare systems under pressure from scarcity of resources and ever-increasing demand for services, difficult priority setting choices need to be made. At the same time, increased attention to patient involvement in a wide range of settings has given rise to the idea that those who are eventually affected by priority setting decisions should have a say in those decisions. In this paper, we investigate arguments for the inclusion of patient representatives in priority setting bodies at the policy level. We find that the standard justifications for patient representation, such as to achieve patient-relevant decisions, empowerment of patients, securing legitimacy of decisions, and the analogy with democracy, all fall short of supporting patient representation in this context. We conclude by briefly outlining an alternative proposal for patient participation that involves patient consultants.

Fair innings.

In many societies, the aging of the population is becoming a major problem. This raises difficult issues for ethics and public policy. On what is known as the fair innings view, it is not impermissible to give lower priority to policies that primarily benefit the elderly. Philosophers have tried to justify this view on various grounds. In this article, I look at a consequentialist, a fairness-based, and a contractarian justification. I argue that all of them have implausible implications and fail to correspond to our moral intuitions. I end by outlining a different kind of consequentialist justification that avoids those implications and corresponds better to our considered moral judgments.

Impartiality and disability discrimination.

Cost-effectiveness analysis is the standard analytical tool for evaluating the aggregate health benefits of treatments and health programs. According to a common objection, however, its use may lead to unfair discrimination against people with disabilities. Since the disability discrimination objection is seldom articulated in a precise way, I first provide a formulation that avoids some implausible implications. Then I turn to the standard defense of cost-effectiveness analysis and argue that it does not succeed. But this does not settle the question of whether the use of cost-effectiveness analysis leads to unfair discrimination. Rather, it shows that the controversy should be approached in a different way. Thus, I conclude by outlining an alternative strategy for answering the question.

Complete lives in the balance.

The allocation of scarce health care resources such as flu treatment or organs for transplant presents stark problems of distributive justice. Persad, Wertheimer, and Emanuel have recently proposed a novel system for such allocation. Their "complete lives system" incorporates several principles, including ones that prescribe saving the most lives, preserving the most life-years, and giving priority to persons between 15 and 40 years old. This paper argues that the system lacks adequate moral foundations. Persad and colleagues' defense of giving priority to those between 15 and 40 leaves them open to the charge that they discriminate unfairly against children. Second, the paper contends that the complete lives system fails to provide meaningful practical guidance in central cases, since it contains no method for balancing its principles when they conflict. Finally, the paper proposes a new method for balancing principles of saving the most lives and maximizing life-years.