고령사회에서 의료법의 과제 - 원격의료 공동결정 자원투입제한 - = The Health Care Law in the Aged Society: Telemedicine, Shared-Decisionmaking, Rationing

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Health care law is facing challenges of the aged society. First, aged people have various chronic diseases and limited mobility. The government has tried to implement in-house care services, while the availability of this service is limited. In this regard, telemedicine would help enhancing service quality. Telemedicine is not prohibited under the Korean law, although it is not covered by the National Health Insurance. The coverage should be enlarged to telemedicine so far as it facilitates community care for the elders with chronic diseases. It is also necessary to couple telemedicine with designation of general physician. Second, aged people are apt to have limited capacity to make decisions. Nowadays, there are voices to maintain to respect the residual capacity and they have their own rights. The problem is that it would sacrifice the quality of decisionmaking, and it holds true for the elder. The so-called empowerment is not easy to implement, while it would be easier to implement shared decisionmaking model in the physician-aged patient relationship. Last but not least, the very controversial issue of rationing would rise along with ageing of the society. It is not allowed to neglect the elder’s own preferences and choices in the name of typical well-being of the aged or at the end of life. At the same time, it is not right to approach this issue in the view of age discrimination. Whether and how a society treats its aged members is and should be an object of political discourse and decisionmaking.