Health care and Rawls’s theory of justice Singapore : a case study

Abstract

The principles of distributive justice instruct the proportioning of finite public resources and can be used to legitimize a particular social arrangement. This paper seeks to evaluate whether the distribution of health care resources (quality, cost, freedom of choice) in Singapore is just. It begins with a review of John Rawls’s seminal work A Theory of Justice, which forms the foundational model of justice for this inquiry, and an examination of the uniqueness of health care as a social good. Two features of the Singapore health care system, the Community Health Assist Scheme (CHAS) and the Medisave-Medishield-Medifund (3M) financing framework, are then discussed and evaluated for the extent to which they improve systemic justice in health care. A brief comparison is made with two other models of health care financing: the free market and egalitarian models.