Kelleher's Views on Two-Tiered Healthcare System and Principles of Beneficence and Justice in Canada

Kelleher's Two-Tiered Healthcare System in Canada

How would Kelleher classify attempts to create a two-tiered healthcare system in Canada to help alleviate wait times? A second article by Kelleher, titled “Beneficence, Justice, and Health Care”, expands on Fisher’s theme. While “[d]octors, nurses, and others in the health care field have specific duties to their patients that are determined by the profession and by the practices of their specific institutions” (Gert, Culver and Clouser, as quoted by Kelleher, 2014), philosopher Ronald Dworkin asserts that, when it comes to the adequate provision of healthcare, “no government is legitimate that does not show equal concern for the fate of all those citizens over whom it claims dominion and from whom it claims allegiance” (Dworkin, as cited by Kelleher, 2014). Dworkin “grounds a political community’s duty to display equal concern toward its members in the coercively enforced commands issued by the community (or by its official agents)…[and] claims that the community’s commands are illegitimate unless they are accompanied by the display of a robust and equal measure of concern for each member” (Dworkin, as cited by Kelleher, 2014). While Kelleher acknowledges that the social duties of health promotion can and should be grounded in a principle of beneficence, widely construed, he makes a unique contribution by arguing that these duties may also be grounded in a principle of justice and that the duties thereby generated “correlate with rights” (Kelleher 2014).