Theories of justice and their implications for priority setting in health care

The paper aims to show how three theories of distributive justice, utilitarianism, egalitarianism and maximin, can provide a clearer understanding of the normative basis of different priority setting regimes in the health service. The paper starts with a brief presentation of the theories, followed by their prescriptions for distribution, as illustrated with their respective preferred points on a utility possibility frontier. After this general discussion, attention is shifted from utils to health. The paper discusses how the recent Norwegian guidelines for priority setting can be understood in the Light of the theories. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.