An eye-opening look at the inevitable moral choices that come along with
tremendous medical progress, Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven but Nobody
Wants to Die is a primer for all Americans to talk more honestly about
health care. Beginning in the 1950s when doctors still paid house calls
but regularly withheld the truth from their patients, Amy Gutmann and
Jonathan D. Moreno explore an unprecedented revolution in health care
and explain the problem with America's wanting everything that medical
science has to offer without debating its merits and its limits. The
result: Americans today pay far more for health care while having among
the lowest life expectancies and highest infant mortality of any
affluent nation.
Gutmann and Moreno--"incisive, influential, and pragmatic thinkers"
(Arthur Caplan)--demonstrate that the stakes have never been higher for
prolonging and improving life. From health care reform and
death-with-dignity to child vaccinations and gene editing, they explain
how bioethics came to dominate the national spotlight, leading and
responding to a revolution in doctor-patient relations, a burgeoning
world of organ transplants, and new reproductive technologies that
benefit millions but create a host of legal and ethical challenges.
With striking examples, the authors show how breakthroughs in cancer
research, infectious disease, and drug development provide Americans
with exciting new alternatives, yet often painful choices. They address
head-on the most fundamental challenges in American health care: Why do
we pay so much for health care while still lacking universal coverage?
How can medical studies adequately protect individuals who volunteer for
them? What's fair when it comes to allocating organs for transplants in
truly life-and-death situations?
A lucid and provocative blend of history and public policy, this urgent
work exposes the American paradox of wanting to have it all without
paying the price.
