ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how a complaint about injustice can be developed within a theory of justice for health care. It suggests that disseminating a big-ticket technology has highly problematic opportunity costs. A big-ticket technology, such as organ transplantation, could turn out to have highly problematic opportunity costs. The chapter considers two ways of converting the complaint about the inefficacy and inefficiency of the investment into an objection based on claims about justice. The first way involves a straightforwardly utilitarian argument; the second will appeal to a more egalitarian account of just health cost. The chapter argues that features of our health care institutions make it very difficult to utilize this argument in a straightforward way to guide decision-making about resource allocation. It presents an alternative, nonutilitarian argument from justice, an argument that again appeals to the opportunity costs of alternative technologies. Health care does many important things for people.
