ABSTRACT
Suppose that a commodity is a good the production, distribution, and consumption of which is properly governed by the norms of the marketplace. Is health care a commodity? One perspective from which health care is clearly not a commodity is the perspective of standard welfare economics. Markets for health care and health care insurance suffer many sources of inefficiency, and this must be at least part of the reason why no developed country on earth leaves the provision of care to the unregulated market. However, philosophers have sought a deeper and perhaps more moralized rationale for the refusal to treat health care as a commodity, grounded in concerns of distributive justice or of the preservation of important social values like community or solidarity. This chapter examines those supposedly deeper arguments and finds them all inconclusive; only the appeal to efficiency can provide a complete and appropriately nuanced account of the imperative to decommodify health care.
