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Ethics and the Business of Biomedicine

Ethics and the Business of Biomedicine

Ethics and the Business of Biomedicine

Denis G. Arnold, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
July 2009
Available
Hardback
9780521764315
$55.00
USD
Hardback
USD
Paperback

    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.

    • Discusses issues central to current public health care debates in North America, Europe and throughout the industrialised world
    • This debate lies at the intersection of bioethics and business ethics: two flourishing areas of applied ethics that are seldom in conversation
    • Each chapter begins with a broad overview of the issues and concludes with a summary and recommendations

    Reviews & endorsements

    “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 (sic) 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

    "This well-organized and intelligently conceived scholarly collection of high-quality chapters by notable experts in bioethics and business ethics offers a timely contribution to some of the most important public policy debates over healthcare that are certain to emerge as the Obama administration turns its attention to healthcare. 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. This combination of rigor and timeliness should make this book a standard for courses on healthcare policy and ethics for years to come, but it should also be of immediate interest to analysts, policymakers, and lawmakers that will be involved in debates over healthcare reform. ...Ethics and the Business of Biomedicine offers quite a few exceptionally original and important contributions and other solid, cutting-edge chapters. As such, the book 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."
    --Michael A. Santoro, Business Ethics Quarterly

    "This book's topic is certainly timely.... All articles are well written and loaded with statistics and empirical data along with philosophical argumentation.... Readers will learn much from this book. It would be excellent as a supplement to biomedical ethics courses, or as a main anthology for courses specifically focused on the intersection of business and bioethics.... Highly recommended...."
    --P. Jenkins, Marywood University, Choice

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    Product details

    July 2009
    Hardback
    9780521764315
    302 pages
    234 × 157 × 18 mm
    0.6kg
    Available

    Table of Contents

    • Introduction, 1. Medicine and the market Daniel Callahan
    • 2. Broken promises: do business friendly strategies frustrate just health care? Norman Daniels
    • 3. Are patents an efficient and internationally fair means of funding research and development for new medicines? Paul Menzel
    • 4. The exploitation of the economically disadvantaged in pharmaceutical research disclosure Tom L. Beauchamp
    • 5. The dangers of detailing: how pharmaceutical marketing threatens health care Jason Hubbard
    • 6. The ethics of direct to consumer pharmaceutical advertising Denis G. Arnold
    • 7. Industry-funded bioethics and the limits of disclosure Carl Elliott
    • 8. Two cheers for the pharmaceutical industry Richard T. De George
    • 9. The third face of medicine: ethics and business and challenges to professionalism Mary V. Rorty, Patricia Werhane, and Ann Mills
    • 10. Theoretical foundations for an organizational ethics: developing norms for a new kind of health care George Khushf
    • 11. A crisis in medical professionalism: time for Flexner II Daniel Wikler
    • Bibliography
    • Index.
      Contributors
    • Daniel Callahan, Norman Daniels, Paul Menzel, Tom L. Beauchamp, Jason Hubbard, Denis G. Arnold, Carl Elliott, Richard T. De George, Mary V. Rorty, Patricia Werhane, Ann Mills, George Khushf, Daniel Wikler

    • Editor
    • Denis G. Arnold , University of North Carolina, Charlotte

      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).