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.

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…

A movement has emerged within health care over the past several decades that sees quality as the combined and unceasing efforts of everyone involved in health care—professionals, patients and their families, researchers, payers, planners, and educators—to make the changes that will lead to better outcomes, better system performance, and better professional development; in other words, better health, better care, and better learning. This sweeping view recognizes that the pursuit of quality and safety is a dynamic process, not a static and narrowly focused endpoint. People associated with the quality movement accept this pursuit as both a moral responsibility and a serious applied science. They also believe unequivocally that everyone in health care has two jobs when they go to work every day: to provide care, and to make it better—a view that is entirely congruent with the idea that “unceasing movement toward new levels of performance” lies at the very heart of professionalism.

The atmosphere was tense. Representatives of the insurance industry were huddled in one corner. The other members of the Task Force on Genetic Information and Insurance, mostly academics and consumer representatives, were bunched across the room. As chair of the task force, I was in the middle, trying to make sense of the disagreement, which was growing more intense by the minute.