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Founded in 1983, the Sjögren’s Foundation is the only nonprofit organization in the United States that has Sjögren’s disease as its sole focus. The efforts of the Sjögren’s Foundation are targeted to both patients and providers and include raising awareness of the disease, building community, providing education, and developing and disseminating both information and resources. Another priority of the Foundation is funding innovative research aimed at improving the understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of this complex disease. The Foundation approaches its work from a patient-first perspective as it continues to foster and grow a community focused on conquering the complexities of Sjögren’s.

This chapter gives an account of the history of African American health-focused activisms that led to the Black Panther Party’s health politics. It surveys significant moments of the long civil rights movement that were mobilized in response to the forms of health inequality experienced by black communities, such as lack of access to healthcare resources; exclusion from whites-only hospitals; refusal of admission to professional schools, associations, and organizations; deficient or non-existent medical care; and deliberate neglect and medical abuse. The Black Panther was considered an heir to health activism, which directly reflected tactics drawn from the tradition of African American health politics.

This chapter discusses the theme of distributive justice, particularly how disability should figure in decisions about distributing scarce healthcare resources. The problem concerns the effectiveness of giving resources to the disabled compared to giving these to non-disabled people when the disability is beyond any remedy or correction. This chapter looks for a set of moral principles that shows respect for both persons, as well as accounts for the kind of judgment in a variety of conflicting cases involving the distribution of healthcare resources. Accordingly, it proposes two main principles. First, some goods may become irrelevant when one is making decisions to distribute available resources. For example, when choosing between a healthy person and a sick person to save, society prefers to choose to save the former because he has more productive years to live. Second, one should treat people equally regardless of whether their identities favor them or not. Perhaps, these principles are not all encompassing but they are the beginning to the formation of a somewhat justified way to distributing healthcare resources.

This chapter first considers some of Peter Singer's views about rationing scarce health-care resources, in particular to the disabled. It then compares these views, along with those of Dan Brock, to some alternative proposals about rationing and the disabled. Finally, the chapter identifies some concerns raised by the proposals discussed in this chapter. Throughout, the discussion focuses on resources that are not under personal control and that it is impermissible to distribute according to purely personal preferences. It is particularly concerned with whether favoring the nondisabled over the disabled in distributing scarce resources involves invidious discrimination, mistakenly focuses on maximizing health benefits, or exhibits no moral fault at all.