Medical Policies in the Aged Societies - Bioethics and Budget Constraints

2002 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary

• Project/Area Number: 12620097
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Single-year Grants
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Politics
• Research Institution: Waseda University
• Principal Investigator: IIJIMA Shozo School of Political Science and Economies, Professor, 政治経済学部, 教授 (80130863)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): TANAKA Tomohiko Tokyo Medical & Dental University, Associate Professor, 教養部, 助教授 (30288039) ; IDO Masanobu Komazawa University, School of Law, Professor, 法学部, 教授 (00232497) ; MAGARA Hideko School of Political Science and Economies, Professor, 政治経済学部, 教授 (50219292) ; YAZAWA Masashi School of Political Science and Economies, Associate Professor, 政治経済学部, 助教授 (20267454)
• Project Period (FY): 2000 – 2002
• Keywords: Aged societies / Small government / Welfare reform / Bioethics / Distributive justice / Right to welfare / New-institutional approach / Comparative politics of advanced countries

Research Abstract

We submitted the following four papers at the International Conference "Reconstructing the Welfare State: Health Care Reform in Italy, Japan, the UK and the USA," The International Jacque Maritain Institute, Treviso, Italy, 16-17 September, 2002.
In their paper "Political Parties, Variety of Capitalism, and Veto Players in Health Care Retrenchment: Japan in Comparative Perspective," Ido and Magara contended that the variety of capitalism and the presence of veto players, rather than types of welfare regimes and the ideology of parties in office, determined the changes in public efforts in the era of welfare retrenchment.
In his "Constitutional Welfare Rights," Kawagishi argued that there was no direct correlation between manners of constitutional response to welfare --- ignorance, declaration of social principles, declaration of social rights, and declaration of both --- and rates of governmental expenditure on welfare in major countries. Thus, execution of welfare rights largely depends upon discretionary policy judgments on the part of the legislative and administrative departments.
Yazawa and Iijima, in their essay "Moral Foundations of Welfare Policies," investigated possible moral foundations of welfare state, while paying attention to concepts of individual's "needs" and "capabilities." They examined a series of liberal theorists including M. Ignatieff, M. Nussbaum, R. Dworkin and R. Goodin, and reached a conclusion that the state should provide a wide range of welfare policies, as long as we commit ourselves to the liberal tradition, a normative outlook to pursue individual liberty as the primary political value.
In his "Rethinking Japanese Bioethics", Tanaka examined how Japanese bioethics has developed, comparing with the history of American bioethics, and revealed the historical conditions that have made Japanese bioethics insufficient as social force to open up the relatively closed system of Japanese modern medicine.