Allocating Medications

Allocating Medications

Running head: ALLOCATING MEDICATIONS 1
Abstract
Government always seems to focus more on the budgets of healthcare initiatives rather than the actual needs of its people. There will always be shortage of access to care, medical technologies, treatments and medications in many cases. This leads to an ethical dilemmas on how to allocate these scarce resources, fairly and ethically while considering autonomy, beneficence, and distributive justice. In this scenario, it is regarding how the VA hospital should allocated newly approved (yet costly and scarce) direct acting anti- viral for the superior treatment of Hepatitis C patients within the VA community. This short paper will address a proposed method for allocating the treatments using Utilitarian principles.










Allocating Medications 2
I purpose the focus of the allocation on the most immediate needs of the most critically ill infected population already afflicted from the harsh adverse effects of the disease, bordering on life threating, and in the most dire need of the lifesaving vaccinations, yesterday. I will support this position with Utilitarian principles, though may be disputed by some Liberalism and egalitarianism, principles but will still show in the end the allocating this life saving fast acting anti-viral meds to the most in need is the ethical thing to do in this scenario.
First the facts. According to the case given, the VA has over 170,000 patients with Hepatitis C, and is growing. Specific outcomes are hard to quantify, and predict, some live long lives, some have complications and some develop life threating conditions. Basically there are different levels of complications from mild to life threatening , and all are entitled to treatment, unfortunately as is often the case, the budget is not enough to treat all, roughly half in fact in...

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