Managed care: an ethical reflection

Christian Century, August 12, 1998 by Edmund D. Pellegrino

Managed care per se is not inherently antithetical to Christian ethics of care. Indeed, properly organized around providing better quality and a more equitable distribution of care, it is a moral obligation. However, as it is operated today, as a commercial enterprise, market-driven and insensitive to the needs of the sick, managed care diverges daily from the gospel conception of charitable justice. For the Christian the response is not accommodation to the so-called "new" medical ethics. What is needed is a bold reassertion of the Christian meaning of healing and the vocation--not the occupation--of health professionals. Accommodation to the ideology of a market-driven commercialized health care system can only end in capitulation, danger to the patient, and a repudiation of the Christian ethic of healing and caring for the sick.

Edmund D. Pellegrino is a pediatrician and director of the Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University in Washington, D. C. This article will appear in The Changing Face of Health Care, edited by John F. Kilner, Robert D. Orr and Judith Allen Shelly, forthcoming from Eerdmans.