ArticleJournal of bioethical inquiry2026
The Ethical Basis of Severity as a Priority Setting Criterion in Healthcare-Egalitarian or Prioritarian?
Article in Journal of bioethical inquiry, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cost-effectiveness, pharmaceutical pricing and the value flower - doing some gardening.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2026Article
- Agreement in Qualitative and Quantitative Assessments of Disease Severity: Evidence from Pharmaceutical Reimbursement in Sweden.Applied health economics and health policy · 2026Article
- Implicit ethical choices in ultra-rare therapy development: researchers' perspectives on patient selection and communication, therapy value, and accessibility.BMC medical ethics · 2026Article
- Severity as a Criterion for Prioritizing Diagnostic Measures.Health care analysis : HCA : journal of health philosophy and policy · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
This article discusses the most plausible moral basis for using severity as a priority setting criterion in healthcare: prioritarianism or egalitarianism. We argue that prioritarianism is superior, since egalitarianism has several problems that prioritarianism avoids. We have elaborated three such problems. First, egalitarianism arguably needs a non-equality-based reference level in order to determine the magnitude of severity. Second, it has the problem of irrelevant alternatives: the assessment of the severity of one person's illness varies depending on the condition of other persons, even when their health status has not changed. Third, egalitarianism introduces excessive complexity, as it must explain what aspects of inequality matter, and why, in relation to illness severity. By contrast, prioritarianism has some benefits that egalitarianism lacks: it aligns theoretically with the concept of severity as a priority setting criterion in healthcare, and it explains why we always have a pro tanto reason to improve someone's health without having to rely on other theories. In the end, if equality of health matters, it is arguably not because of its connection to severity.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.