Health care justice and hospice care.

TL;DRAbstract

Most theories of health care justice account inadequately for hospice. They tend to regard death as an external force rather than as something to be integrated into an overall theory of care. They tend to be very individualistic. And they tend to assume relationships of equal power among independent agents whose conception of justice is the delineation of fair rules. Yet for most of health care, and especially for the care of the dying, these assumptions make no sense. First, as hospice workers know well, death can be a friend. Second, health care is consummately about relationships. Hospice workers also understand this clearly. Third, health care relationships, especially in attending to the dying, are characterized by profound inequality, dependence, and loss of control. And in the face of sickness and death, the ultimate question is whether life itself, not any rule, is really fair. To account for these clinical realities, an adequate theory of health care justice must have somethin

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