Ethics and the Business of Biomedicine

Description

During the last thirty years we have witnessed sweeping changes in health care worldwide, including new and expensive biomedical technologies, an increasingly powerful and influential pharmaceutical industry, steadily increasing health care costs in industrialised nations, and new threats to medical professionalism. The essays collected in this book concern costs and profits in relation to just health care, the often controversial practices of pharmaceutical companies, and corruption in the professional practice of medicine. Leading experts discuss justice in relation to business-friendly strategies in the delivery of health care, access to life saving drugs, the ethics of pharmaceutical company marketing practices, exploitation in drug trials, and undue industry influence over medicine. They offer guidance regarding the ethical delivery of health care products and services by profit-seeking organisations operating in a global marketplace, and recommend pragmatic solutions to enhance organisational integrity and curb medical corruption in the interest of patient welfare.

Denis G. Arnold is Surtman Distinguished Professor of Business Ethics at Belk College of Business, University of North Carolina, Charlotte and Senior Associate, Center for Applied and Professional Ethics, University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is author of The Ethics of Global Business (2009) and co-editor of Ethical Theory and Business, 8th Edition (2009) and Rising Above Sweatshops: Innovative Approaches to Global Labor Challenges (2003).

'The core norms of medicine as a profession are increasingly becoming infected with more business-oriented and profit-oriented norms. More and more so only patients are recognized as having rights to health care. One need not be a Marxist to have concerns about this state of affairs; it is sufficient to be a seriously ill and uninsured small business owner. Denis Arnold is to be commended for assembling an admirable collection of thoughtful essays aimed at prompting greater reflection on what the norms of medicine ought to be in a health care system with an undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive profit disorder.' Leonard M. Fleck, Michigan State University 'The health care system is a web of patients, physicians, third party payees, pharmaceutical companies, and hospitals. This collection of essays is a must for anyone interested in the justice and integrity of our health care system. Professor Arnold has done an outstanding job in bringing together many of the best minds in applied ethics to reflect on important ethical issues in the business of healthcare.' Norman E. Bowie, University of Minnesota 'Superbly edited by Denis G. Arnold, Ethics and the Business of Biomedicine combines academic rigor with up-to-date consideration of contemporary developments in the field of biomedicine. ... makes an outstanding contribution to understanding the ethical implications of the deep transformations that are occurring in the financing and delivery of healthcare in the twenty-first century.' Business Ethics Quarterly