Center Professor Len Fleck spent May 27-31 in Bergen, Norway as part of an International Advisory Board for the project “Prioritizing Health Care: Tension and Interplay between Legal, Political, Economic and Professional Perspectives.” This project has been funded for three years (2014-17) by the Norwegian Research Council.
Apart from commenting on various project-produced papers, Dr. Fleck did a presentation titled “Priority Setting in Health Care: Sublime Principles and Subversive Practices.” In Dr. Fleck’s words, the key conclusion from his presentation was that priority setting is much more complex than most philosophers and policymakers recognize. More precisely, there are no abstract moral principles that can yield fair and effective priority setting policies and practices. Instead, priority setting must be practical, contextual, and pluralistic. In addition, priority setting that is fair and politically legitimate ought to be a product of a rational democratic deliberative procedure.
MSU Bioethics 