BMJ 1996;313:1567-1568 (21 December)

Editorials

What makes a just healthcare system?

Broader professional ethics, including considerations of the public interest and the common good

After the first world war, many industrialised countries fostered publicly supported sickness insurance, realising that equitable access to health care could improve the health of their populations. By the early 1970s, universal health coverage had been achieved in Europe and the developed countries of the former British Commonwealth.1 Within the developed world, the United States was a striking exception, and this anomaly led to comparisons with South Africa, a country riven by racial policies, which had also turned its back on a national health system in the 1940s.2 Since the 1970s the pendulum has swung in many countries towards privatisation and managed care, no doubt at least in part due to American influence. Interest in universal access to health care in the United States at the start of the Clinton era was short lived at a time . . . [Full text of this article]


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