This is what can happen when a philosopher casts his lens on global justice and health.
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Multidisciplinary Approaches to Multidimensional Problems
January 28, 2010
Last month I had the opportunity to attend the Institute for Health Care Improvement’s National Quality Forum in Orlando. I listened to world-renowned economist, Uwe Reinhardt, discuss the highly reticulated social, cultural, political, and economic inequities that help determine global and individual health. His talk followed that of Marshall Ganz, who drew on his experience both as a grassroots community organizer and as a public policy expert, to explain how clinicians might collectivize our individual quality improvement initiatives into a social movement. While it is not unheard of for economists and policy experts to weigh in on health care issues, the scope of their talks reached well beyond their respective disciplines, venturing into the realms of anthropology, philosophy and even ancient history.
It struck me how much we have to learn from a diversity of perspectives, how much we stand to gain by looking beyond the traditional medical establishment in order to cure what ails health care. Across our universities, I think we are seeing an increasing blur between disciplines and between the roles of educators and activists. Medicine has traditionally been a siloed activity that clinicians have set apart by design. The more we stand together to understand the human condition and the conditions in which humans live, the more richly and profoundly we can address pressing issues of health care access and quality.
I recently came across an article about Thomas Pogge, a professor of philosophy at Yale, who is working with a veritable who’s who in social science, business and medicine to create an alternative to monopoly pricing for pharmaceutical companies to reap profits. He proposes a fund, backed by world governments that will reward pharmaceutical companies based on their drugs’ performance. Drug companies will sell drugs at cost, and then realize rewards based on their efficacy. Pogge distilled a complex and perverse system of incentives and inter-dependencies into two core needs: Pharma needs to make money; poor people need access to medicines. And he is finding a way to address both needs, which have heretofore been considered mutually exclusive. He has caught the eye of a number of big drug companies that are excited by the possibility of doing well while doing good.
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