What is the obligation 0f the medical profession in the distribution of health care?

Abstract

Justice requires that health care facilities and physicians (and other providers) be available to meet health care needs. These obligations are primarily social. They constrain the institutions through which providers are trained and through which incentives to work in various specialities and locations are arranged. Individual physicians come to have particular obligations concerning the delivery of care through their responses to these institutions, not through the direct appeal to principles of distributive justice. It is argued that many institutional arrangements for distributing physicians in accordance with the requirement of justice violate no basic liberties, contrary to some libertarian views.