Gene Outka wrote the article “Social Justice and Equal Access to Health Care” in 1974. It is still as relevant now as it was then. In it Outka reminds us that:
Health crises seem non-meritarian because they occur so often for reasons beyond our control or power to predict.
The claim that some are to be treated differently based on merit or virtues, forces us to come to a conclusion that some people are more than others. Such a conclusion calls us to give all human beings a price tag.
If one agrees, for whatever reasons, with the agapeic judgment that each person should be regarded as irreducibly valuable, then one cannot succumb to a social productiveness criterion of human worth.
Therefore, concept of merit or virtues, are useless.