Health care reform around the world is born in considerable measure of the need to reconcile our growing capacity to provide effective health care with diminishing economic means to sustain this capacity indefinitely. It is precisely under these circumstances that the conflict between individual rights to health care and the state’s responsibilities to provide it becomes unavoidable. Although it cannot be eliminated, the conflict can be managed. But the task requires us to go beyond formulating economic policies or designing new structural systems for delivering health care. It requires an understanding of the purpose of health care for individuals and society. It includes stipulating limitations for individual rights and state responsibilities. In the final analysis, justice in health care will be achieved through a division of labor, at the center of which there is a set of reasonable and binding expectations shared reciprocally between the individual and the state.
