PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - H Steiner TI - The just provision of health care: a reply to Elizabeth Telfer. AID - 10.1136/jme.2.4.185 DP - 1976 Dec 01 TA - Journal of Medical Ethics PG - 185--189 VI - 2 IP - 4 4099 - http://jme.bmj.com/content/2/4/185.short 4100 - http://jme.bmj.com/content/2/4/185.full SO - J Med Ethics1976 Dec 01; 2 AB - Dr Hillel Steiner in this reply to Elizabeth Telfer takes each of her arguments for different arrangements of a health service and examines them--'four positions which can be located on a linear ideological spectrum'--and adds a fifth which could have the effect of 'turning the alleged linear spectrum into a circle'. Underlying both Elizabeth Telfer's article and Dr Steiner's reply, the base is inescapably a 'political' one, but cannot be abandoned in favour of purely philosophical concepts. Whatever the attitude of mind of the reader of these two papers to the provision of a health service, the stimulus to more careful assessments of our own National Health Service and its problems can only be good.