Der eigenverantwortliche Mensch

Abstract

Personal responsibility for health is part of the federal goverment's health reform to improve health and health outcomes and to shift costs from government to the individual. Allthough self-responsibility seems intuitively attractive, many questions remain unanswered. These include socioeconomic barriers of personal responsibility; differences between personal responsibility and individual freedom; costs of promoting personal responsibility; and counterproductive effects of personal responsibility. Effective health improvement requires a new balance between personal and social responsibility.