Cost containment: Issues of moral conflict and justice for physicians

In response to rapidly rising health care costs in the United States, federal and state governments and private industry are instituting numerous and diverse cost-containment plans. As devices for coping with a scarcity of resources, such plans present serious challenges to physicians' traditional single-minded devotion to patient welfare. Those which contain costs by directly limiting medical options or by controlling physicians' daily clinical decisions can threaten the quality of medical care by allowing economic authorities to make essentially medical judgments. In contrast, other plans coax compliance by arranging incentives, e.g., offering financial rewards for successful cost containment. While they allow for clinical freedom, these plans create conflicts between physicians' fiduciary obligations to their patients and the competing interests of the payers. Such conflicts arise as physicians try to work within governmental or corporate cost containment policies, and also as they attempt to “streamline” clinical efficiency. Throughout, issues of justice emerge as physicians seek to reconcile their own patients' claims upon limited common resources with others' equally legitimate claims.