An impoverished 69-year-old man is diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas. There is no hope for cure,...

Question

An impoverished 69-year-old man is diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas. There is no hope for cure, but radiation and chemotherapy, which could cost more than $150,000, may extend his life for a few months. If this patient unambiguously requests treatment, his doctors may struggle with the decision but will probably provide the treatment, ignoring the cost as a matter of principle.

On the other hand, a health department — or a hospital — proposes an action that would prevent many cases of some forms of pancreatic cancer. It could be offering free education on the effects of alcohol on the pancreas.

In both instances, health experts must make tough decisions that entail weighing the costs of an action against its benefits in extending human life. Why is the value of extending human life the determining factor in the first example and the cost of the intervention the determining factor in the second? These two scenarios expose tangled issues of ethics, cost, and cost-effectiveness and highlight a troubling structural bias against prevention.

Many people reject any attempt to put a dollar value on human life. From such a perspective, any withholding of potentially life-extending interventions on the basis of their costs is unethical. But within every organization and throughout society, limits on funding make it impossible to pay for every conceivable intervention. That reality forces health leaders to make painful decisions about what to pay for.

In your paper:

1) Discuss this scenario in respect to ethics, cost and cost-effectiveness.
2) What should a physician do in this case?
3) If the treatment is refused, how would you go about finding a way to obtain treatment for this man?

Length: Submit a 3-page paper. APA, In-text citations and 2-3references

David · Accepted Answer

Student Name 
Course Name 
University Name 
10
th
-September-2017
An impoverished 69-year-old man is diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas. There is 
no hope for cure, but radiation and chemotherapy, which could cost more than $150,000, may 
extend his life for a few months. If this patient unambiguously requests treatment, his doctors 
may struggle with the decision but will probably provide the treatment, ignoring the cost as a 
matter of principle. On the other hand, a health department — or a hospital — proposes an 
action that would prevent many cases of some forms of pancreatic cancer. It could be offering 
free education on the effects of alcohol on the pancreas. 
The situation is very similar to euthanasia. Each year nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults 
say they get an annual physical. For some, this is a source of reassurance that they are 
healthy, while for some, it's a way to catch something before it gets more serious, and for 
others it's simply about a connection with someone who "cares about them." It is a tradition, 
one that the U.S. Affordable Care Act requires insurers to cover and the cornerstone of 
primary care. Annual checkups account for more than 8% of doctor visits. A typical annual 
checkup includes: 
 Vital signs (blood pressure, heart rate, respiration rate and temperature) 
 Heart and lung function 
 Body exam (head and neck, abdomen, skin, extremities, male- and female-specific) 
 Neurologic exam 
 Laboratory tests (complete blood count, urinalysis and chemistry profile) 
Each visit takes around 23 minutes, which means doctors in the United States spend 
approximately 17 million hours each year running their stethoscopes over 45 million 
completely healthy people. In the U.S.,

An impoverished 69-year-old man is diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas. There is no hope for cure, but radiation and chemotherapy, which could cost more than $150,000, may extend his life for a few...

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