The Ethics of scarce health resource allocation: Towards equity in the Uganda health care system

The central ideas in this work are health as a moral entitlement and equity in health. It is a discourse on distributive justice in health and takes Uganda as a case study. It describes Uganda health system especially the extent and distribution of health-related injustice brought about by severe poverty and the manner health resources are raised and allocated. This manner disproportionately adversely affects the poor's access to health services and endangers their livelihoods due to catastrophic health expenditure. This work further critically reviews the theory of utilitarianism (QALYS) which is popularly used in the allocation of scarce health resources. Utilitarianism is accepted as good for ensuring efficiency in health resource allocation, but not good enough to ensure equity in health. This being the case a discussion of other ethical principles of health resource allocation that attempt to close the 'fairness gap' left by the theory of utilitarianism becomes necessary. Having critically examined QALYs and other moral principles, it emerges that a discourse on these per se is good but not good enough to guarantee equity in health in Uganda, even if a harmony between these suggestions were found. The main reason for this is that the said discourse is based on a subtle, yet wrong assumption, that all health services in Uganda are financed by the state and therefore health equity would be achieved if those resources are equitably distributed. This assumption ignores the fact that due to severe poverty and a very steep social gradient, out-of-pocket payment for health services is a prohibitive factor in the use of private health services. This leads to unequal access to health services between social classes since 50% of health out-put is from the private health service providers, hence must be paid for. This points to the fact that there is a strong spiral cause relationship between poverty and health inequity, the fact that is ignored in the discourse on QALYs and other allocation principles that aim at health equity. Therefore, since the poor are disproportionately adversely affected in the current system, developing an equitable financing mechanism for the health care system which takes into consideration the special needs of the poor should be a key priority in Uganda