[Personal responsibility -- a criterion for allocation in health care?]

Personal responsibility of patients for their own health is often cited as a means of allocating health care resources. It is however unclear whether applying responsibility as a distributive criterion is just. Several difficulties are associated with the concept of personal responsibility in the medical field. These include in particular 1) theoretical considerations of justice 2) causal factors in medicine, and 3) freedom of health behaviour. The article investigates these problems and tries to determine conditions for a fair use of self-responsibility as a criterion for allocation of resources in health care.