The concept of medical commons is a bogus and dangerous concept

A fundamental concept of the various types of egalitarianism is. neither coherent,correct and operationally meaningful. .. That concept is : Individually possessed  resources or assets should be considered as part of a collective pool owned by everyone and that all have an equal right to some share of the pool.

In regard to a private property system the rights of the owner in general terms are clear. The owner has the right to use his property,exclude others from us of the property and dispose of the property through sale,gift or inheritance.

 In contrast , the rights are in a common ownership system are vague and indeterminate. Feser said it is not clear how one can be said to "own" something if no one in principle is excluded from making a claim on that something.

Even a  cursory survey of the twentieth century reveals how tragic and unsuccessful were attempts to build a society based on the notion of common ownership and the abolition of private property. The Bolshevik revolution promised peace,freedom ,equality and prosperity and delivered mass murder and starvation.Communist China's attempt in that regard were no better .The dramatic nighttime photograph of the Korean peninsula showing darkness in the north and countless points of light in the south tells the story of the difference between the two systems of ownership..

Yet the movement to consider medical or health care resources as a central pool or a medical commons has had surprisingly wide acceptance in certain medical organizations and medical academia and among health care planners and policy wonks.

Even though the concept of a collective pool of individually possessed resources is basically void of meaningful operational content a derivative metaphor-that of the physician as a steward of the mythical medical resources-has been promulgated and to some a surprising degree accepted and has become part of a major  and growing effort to control medical care and has become part of the discourse about health care policy.

The rules by which a collective of healthcare resources  would be allocated are not defined, but  those who advocate the physician as steward of these resources have several things in mind to make the metaphor operationally meaningful, the most important of which is the purported ethical requirement of physicians to adhere to guidelines which in their most at least superficially justifiable  analytical form are based on a cost benefit analysis and in their least evidence based form , expert opinion.

Cost effective analysis has been smuggled into the professionalism package in the trojan horse of social justice. This is bogus as well. The utilitarian mantra of the greatest good for the greatest number is not necessarily a part of the concept of social justice.The basis of social justice is equal respect for all humans while utilitarians would favor policies that benefit the aggregate though some individual may loose. The prominent egalitarian John Rawls rejected utilitarian allocations because they ignored the separateness of individuals and in his mythical behind- the- veil contract he believed that individuals would not sign up for a society that would sacrifice them for some aggregate benefit.