Ethics of public health policies Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Ethics of public health policies - Essay Example whether the government can supplant an individual decisions and choices on his health care and to what extent this intrusion is warranted or allowed. Quoting the Supreme Court’s Jacobson v Massachusetts ruling in 1905 that restraints on an individual’s liberty are necessary for the public common good, Buchanan (2008) asserts that paternalism is relied upon by public health professionals to justify policy and administration of programmes that usurp individual choice. Dworkin’s definition of paternalism as intervention in an individual decision making liberty for welfare purposes is in line with Blacksher’s (2014) finding that healthcare programmes can be enforced by reward or coercion and is intended solely for the persons good or welfare. This usurpation of decision or choice making is based on the presumptions that; the public healthcare policy is right, for instance, that vaccines will solve the problem such as the eradication of polio or diseases that individuals are compelled to be vaccinated against, and that nonintervention would harm the public. A diluted version of paternalism has been applied to causative behavior such as smoking and other lifestyle changes. According to al Amin et al (n.d.), vaccination of preteens with the Human Papilloma Virus vaccine to guard against reinfections that later cause cervical cancer was enabled by a law enabling the minors to give consent to vaccination in California. Closely related to paternalism, the utilitarian theory provides that any public health action resulting in the greatest good for the greatest number is the most reasonable cause of action (Buchanan, 2008). The utilitarian approach is commonly criticized as use of any means to achieve the public health goals. Example of this approach has been media campaigns such as drug advertisements communicating no meaningful information, but intended to shock the targeted populations towards certain directions. This theory emphasizes the needed result more