The Public's Health: Right or Means to Gross National Happiness? (e~*)

摘要

There are two different ways one could look at the activities of a society's health sector as it offers prevention, cure, management and heartfelt care (when the first three fail). The first way considers that the community has a duty to provide whatever it takes to allow each individual to achieve the age, functionality and health status that he or she desires. The other view is that the health sector's activity is only one of many means to create conditions that increase the probability of a society with civic engagement and room for individuals to attain their potential; a means to a larger end, not an end in itself. From this perspective one is not obliged to prioritize individual desires to achieve an age or some other health related health endpoint for themselves that when widely practiced would cause problems for society at large. The desire to have male children is one such example. What would the societal impact be if many people lived to be 150? Is there something to be learned from an intellectual exercise in which one attempts to set health sector priorities to further the good of society as a whole and not to simply provide all available health technology that individuals demand?