 Distributing scarce livers: The moral reasoning of the general publicPeter A. Ubel and George Loewenstein Social Science & Medicine, 1996, vol. 42, issue 7, 1049-1055 Abstract: The transplant system has been criticized for not paying enough attention to efficiency in distributing scarce organs. But little research has been done to see how the general public views tradeoffs between efficiency and equity. We surveyed members of the general public to see how they would distribute organs among patients with varying chances of benefiting from them. In addition, we asked subjects to explain their decisions and to tell us about any other information they would have liked in order to make the decisions. We found that the public places a very high value on giving everyone a chance at receiving scarce resources, even if that means a significant decrease in the chance that available organs will save people's lives. Our results raise important questions about whether the aims of outcomes research and cost-effective studies agree with the values of the general public. Keywords: transplantation; equity; prognosis; ethics; health; policy (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:42:y:1996:i:7:p:1049-1055 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier |
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