Customer Reviews

Health Care and the Ethics of Encounter: A Jewish Discussion of Social Justice (Studies in Social Medicine)

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A wonderful book for helping us understand the ongoing health care debate. Full of needed information and written in an engaging and understandable way.

Less of a coherent book than a collection of essays only slightly related to each other: first an essay on Oregon's attempt to find a logical way of rationing Medicaid spending, then an essay on various theories of justice generally (e.g. Rawls, Nozak), then a discussion of various attempts by Jewish sages (of the talmudic and midrashic eras) to create Jewish law governing allocation of scarce resources in situations where lives were at stake, and then finally an attempt to relate the book of Ruth to modern politics. (The author's general bias is in favor of national health insurance of some sort). I thought the "Jewish essays" were more interesting than the rest of the book -- perhaps because I'm more interested in Jewish topics, perhaps because the issues raised in sacred texts are more likely to be relevant in 2003 than the details of Oregon's Medicaid policy.