Distributive justice and the Minnesota health access initiative

As I have suggested, from the perspective of distributive justice MinnesotaCare's reforms are inadequate. But to coin (and alter slightly) a phrase of Kant's, if its authors do not deserve our moral esteem, perhaps they do merit our encouragement, and it is on a note of the latter that I will conclude. MinnesotaCare is an experiment in systemic incremental change being performed in a complex health care system, the only true laboratory for such an experiment. For this reason, it will provide us important information concerning the ethics, economics, [and] the politics of health care reform while improving the position of some Minnesotans in a significant way. Thus, while MinnesotaCare is susceptible to forceful moral criticism, as an experiment in reform it holds out the promise of providing us some of the data necessary for discovering a just solution.