Healthcare for the Elderly Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

Healthcare for the Elderly - Essay Example reece, Germany and Italy, increase in taxes to fund healthcare for the older population and decline in trade and savings as these older population retire from active social participation. These challenges being witnessed today will continue to be witnessed in future unless governments come up with responsive policies to address the situation. The best theory to apply in an ethical dilemma for how best to allocate the limited healthcare resources for an aging population and end-of-life care is utilitarianism (Harris, 1987). The theory holds that the best ethically acceptable action is the one that leads to greatest overall benefits. Accordingly, the practical use of utilitarian will be though the application of Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) as a tool of assessing the total gains from heath care approaches compared to others. The ethical challenges to preparation of this healthcare provision are that utilitarian principle in resource allocation fails to offer an equitable approach of distributing resource (Lockwood, 1988). In addition, it fails to consider the variations in need for health care by focusing only on the benefits to be achieved, yet some groups may be more deserving to be allocated those resources. National Institute on Aging (2007): Why Population Aging Matters. A Global Perspective: National Institutes of Health U.S. Department of Health And Human Services: Retrieved from: