Do Children Get Their Fair Share of Health and Dental Care?

Abstract

This paper reviews the work of several authors, D.W. Brock, D. Callahan, L. Churchill, L.M. Kopelman, R. Tong who consider assumptions and arguments about how to allocated health and dental care to children fairly. They use various approaches including feminist, rights based, and principled considerations, applying general notions of duty or justice to the issues of children's access to basic health and dental care. Two discuss these issues in relation to the work of David Hume. These authors consider children's greatest unmet health needs, including that of dental care, often mistakenly regarded as medically unimportant in terms of children's wellbeing, opportunities, and self-image. They review possible age bias against children in the allocation of health and dental care, the gap between what we say and do where children are concerned, and whether some fundamental shift in social thinking needs to occur.