Quality of Life and Human Difference: Genetic Testing, Health Care, and Disability

by Edited by David Wasserman , Jerome Bickenbach , Robert Wachbroit

• ISBN13: 9780521832014
• ISBN10: 0521832012
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-05-09
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This study brings together two important literatures together in the one volume. One concerns the role of quality assessments in social policy, especially health policy. The second concerns ethical and social issues raised by prenatal testing for disability. Hitherto, these two literatures have had little contact with each other: few scholars have written about both, or have compared the two domains in a systematic way, while people with disabilities and disability scholars are underrepresented in recent discussion on health policy and quality of assessment. This book turns the perspectives of disability scholars on issues that have largely been the province of health methodology, policy and philosophy, while angling philosophical policy analysis on problems that have largely been the province of disability scholarship. This volume will be sought after by bioethicists, philosophers, and specialists in disability studies and healthcare economics.

Table of Contents

Contributors	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction	1	(26)
DAVID WASSERMAN, JEROME BICKENBACH, AND ROBERT WACHBROIT
1 Assessing Quality of Life: Clinical versus Health Policy Uses	27	(16)
ROBERT WACHBROIT
2 Predicting Genetic Disability while Commodifying Health	43	(24)
ANITA SILVERS
3 Preventing Genetically Transmitted Disabilities while Respecting Persons with Disabilities	67	(34)
DAN W. BROCK
4 Disability, Ideology, and Quality of Life: A Bias in Biomedical Ethics	101	(24)
RON AMUNDSON
5 Values for Health States in QALYs and DALYs: Desirability versus Well-Being and Worth	125	(17)
ERIK NORD
6 Preventing the Existence of People with Disabilities	142	(30)
JEFF McMAHAN
7 Where Is the Sin in Synecdoche? Prenatal Testing and the Parent-Child Relationship	172	(45)
ADRIENNE ASCH AND DAVID WASSERMAN
8 The Social Context of Individual Choice	217	(20)
TOM SHAKESPEARE
9 Disability and Health Systems Assessment	237	(30)
JEROME BICKENBACH
Index	267