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Ethical Issues in Health Policies

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Ethical issues with Obesity Prevention Policies in the United States

In the United States, growing concern about obesity and unhealthy eating has lead to promote policy efforts to promote healthier eating. The federal government, as well as state and local governments, have proposed and implemented variety of policies to increase consumption of healthy food and reduce overconsumption of unhealthy food. Some examples of such policies are- bans on trans-fat in restaurants, nutritional requirements for fast food meals marketed as children’s meals, proposed taxes on sugary drinks , proposal by New York City to limit sales of sugary drinks, policies limiting the density of fast food restraint and many more.
The obesity prevention policies have many ethical arguments for and against them. The two core ethical concerns are-ethical concern with individual autonomy, and ethical concern with equality. There is disagreements too that which dimension, equality or autonomy have priority and also that is it justifiable for government policies to diminish equality or autonomy along one dimension in order to increase it on other dimension.
Ethical concern with equality of obesity prevention policy- The obesity prevention policy is concerned about fair distribution of multiple things like health, income, financial spending on healthy food, geographic access to healthy food and many more. But it is seen that none of these are equitably distributed in U.S.A. There are inequalities which are present across race, ethnicity, geographic areas, and income groups. Some specific policies create a more equal and fair distribution of one thing (eg. Health) while exacerbating the unequal distribution of something else. For example- policy to increase taxes on sugary drinks have ethical objections. Because in order to have equal distribution of health by preventing consumption of sugary

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