Buy essay on Distributive Justice

Medicine in our country has much of problems but I want to pay attention to one of the most important – uninsured patients. Some hospitals refuse to treat uninsured people. Other hospitals have no right to do it. They are treating uninsured patients but they collect more money from such type of patients. They suppose to pay more for the same treatment than insured patient do.
Let us explore this problem from the ethical side.
What is happening when uninsured patient is treated but finally he or she is not able to pay for medical bills? What are hospitals doing fill the money for treatment and medicines? It is ethically right action when a doctor is treating a sick person if he or she has money or not. Nevertheless, everybody knows that there are just some volunteering hospitals all over the country. If we like it or not money are important and they give more possibilities to treat people. Hospitals are paying for equipment, for the workers job, finally light, water, other communal public services are important, and hospitals are paying for them. Therefore, we see that hospitals need certain sum of money every month and they are taking this sum from the money that patients are paying for the treatment. It is easy to see that medical bills – it is not just money for doctors. Just few wealthy donors want to give money for hospitals’ needs. During any treatment, doctors are spending materials, electricity, water and working hours. For most of these things hospitals have paid already before a treatment have started. Often medical bills just return spent money and bringing just little benefits to a hospital. I mentioned these known facts here to explain the reason why hospitals need to return certain sum for the certain treatment and why it is not against the ethics.
Therefore, if after treatment an uninsured patient is not able to pay his or her medical bills hospitals have two ways how to get money back and support themselves.
First way is to get more money from insured patients. I want to give one quotation about this way of compensation money for treatment. Newdick (1995) noted that “they simply use different forms of “creative billing” to bring in additional revenue from other insurers in order to shift the costs from the money loss. Some of the different forms of creative billing include, fudging, up coding, unbundling, and exploding.” Other way of compensating the material means is to make treatment more expensive for those uninsured patients who are able to pay their medical bills.
There are many ethical questions are involved with it. Let us pay attention to two most important and obvious problems. First, doctors are saying things they know are false. Secondly, in such cases hospitals are taking something that is not belonging to them. Galambos (2005) emphasized that many hospitals are doing it and we know that they are doing it not for their own extra benefits. They just want to make up for loss of money that is important for a hospital and other patients. Anyway, it is a lie and everybody knows that lie is not ethical.
Form the other side, every person has right and ability to become an insured patient. I agree that many of people are not wealthy but it is ordinary for a person to care about important things. They are paying for transport, food, cloths, education and many other things. Everybody knows that health is among the most important things in the life of any human being.
Insurance gives us a possibility to care about our health from far. It is inevitable for everyone to find himself or herself at the hospital’s bed. Sure, it is not very pleasant for a person to think about death and sickness. Insurance helps to save money and protect both a person who needs medical help and a hospital that will give this help in future. According to Damberg and others (2003), we see that often it is not new information for a person that he or she has some problems with the health and it is even not ethically from the patient’s side not to care about materials means for his or her treatment.
Many of patients understand that they need some expensive treatment and they know that doctors have to treat them anyway. For example if a patient needs heart, kidney or liver he or she knows that even if it is impossible to pay for the transplantation nobody will take the organ away from a patient and some people are using it.
I think that it is more ethically to make treatment for uninsured patient more expensive than let them involve hospitals into financial losses.
I want to finish this paper with quotation from a research made by Reisbeck (2006): “Yes, the hospitals job is to treat patients and to keep the community healthy. However, it society’s job to make sure each person’s medical bills are paid so hospitals have the proper funding to continue to operate smoothly and safely. Unfortunately, the above scenario does not always happen…”

References:
Damberg, S. and others. (2003). Evaluating the Feasibility of Developing National Outcomes Data Bases to Assist Patients with Making Treatment Decisions. Rand.
Galambos, C. (2005). “The Uninsured: A Forgotten Population.” Health and Social Work, Vol. 30.
Newdick, C. (1995). Who Should We Treat? Law, Patients, and Resources in the NHS. Clarendon Press.
Reisbeck, T. (2006). Business ethics and conduct. Case 6.3. Retrieved from asteroid.cs.linfield.edu/~vreisbe/class_projects/…/medicalbilling.doc
Tobler, L. (2006, May). “Prognosis for the Uninsured: State Lawmakers Are Still Trying to Do Something about the Millions of Americas without Health Care Coverage, but the Solution Remains Elusive.” State Legislatures, Vol. 32.