Just caring: Assessing the ethical and economic costs of personalized medicine

Personalized medicine has been touted as a revolutionary form of cancer care. It has been portrayed as precision medicine, targeting with deadly accuracy cancer cells and sparing patients the debilitating broad-spectrum side effects of more traditional forms of cancer therapy. But personalized medicine still has its costs to patients and society, both moral and economic costs. How to recognize and address those issues will be the focus of this essay. We start with these questions: Does everyone faced with cancer have a moral right to the most effective cancer care available, no matter what the cost, no matter whether a particular individual has the personal ability to pay for that care or not? Or are there limits to the cancer care that anyone has a right to at social expense? If so, what are those limits and how are those limits to be determined? Are those limits a matter of both morality and economics? I will answer this last question in the affirmative. This is what I refer to as the “Just Caring” problem in health care.