[Ethics and health economics - a challenging relationship]

Ethics and health economics are often seen as contradictory. Based on new obligations imposed by the Federal Department of Home Affairs demanding ethics and health economics to be both embedded in the medical curriculum we challenge the relationship between the two fields. This article shows that there is a conflict between ethics and economics if the two disciplines pursue opposing fundamental values. In a health care system that focuses on the patient as a suffering human being and the fair allocation of resources ethics and health economics are not conflicting but rather complementary and mutually supportive. However, medical ethics does not only need to support but to unsettle, too; it will need both to accelerate and to brake. Only a conception of economics which allows for features like deceleration will be able to cope with a patient's needs and only on this basis can ethics fulfil its major task of promoting intentional ethical decision-making in public health organisations that is both structurally efficient and effective.