Tom Murray, president of The Hastings Center, discussed how and why health reform should reflect our values in an interview on NPR’s Science Friday.

The health reform debate, like so many debates in ethics and policy related to health care, tends to assume that the representative “health care professional” is a physician. For many months, American have heard how the various reform proposals would affect physician’s autonomy, practice, income, terms of employment, and so on. No one would argue that the interests of physicians are not integral to this debate.

But let’s look at the numbers…

Let’s get even more pragmatic about our values and talk about accountability.

It is a business truism that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Our healthcare system is incredibly adept at measuring revenue, procedures performed, and patients moved out the door. In our current system, physicians and facilities get tangible rewards for managing these measures efficiently. However, research such as the Dartmouth Atlas illustrates that more of these things—payments, procedures, and patient throughput—aren’t yielding better health outcomes…

Liberty. Justice, Responsibility, Solidarity.

These are some of the American Values highlighted in the Hasting Centers report on “Connecting American Values with Health Reform”.

Watching health reform unfold here in Washington, however, that “Connection” is painfully elusive. The debate is not a careful calibration of competing rights, values and obligations. It’s a political moshpit. Instead of values, we have vitriol…

Some major fault lines in the current health reform debate arise out of conflicting notions about the definition and goals of efficiency. There is, however, a simple and intuitively appealing concept of efficiency that I believe should be a central virtue of any health reform effort: To be efficient means to use our resources in the best possible way to achieve our ends. This makes “efficiency” an instrumental ideal—a goal whose meaning depends on whatever substantive ends we embrace.