Medical Care Rationing

The American health care system rations care already, even though most people do not like to use the word. "Rationing" implies that some will have to do with less, in the greater interest of all. Rationing is the distribution of resources to services or individuals according to rules based on one or more of the following: personal characteristics, disease status, cost of intervention, and outcomes. Additionally, the act of rationing has an ethical component; it is not just a matter of value-free economics. Dictionaries define rationing not simply as denying something--which would reasonably make it a fearful term in health care discussions--but as distributing equally or equitably some commodity or resource in scarce supply.

In this country, access to quality health care is available to those who have insurance, either because their employers provide it, or because they can afford to purchase it independently. H

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ould shift some of the burden from the employer to the state or national level. A plan, uniformly executed, would decide how best to spend citizens' taxes or employers' contributions toward medical care. The Health Resource Allocation Strategy is a plan devised to address the problem of rationing on many levels: "it is a conceptual and mathematical process for comparing health outcomes with health care costs across all programs in the health sector of the economy." Devised by a lengthy list of contributors over more than two decades, the Health Resource Allocation Strategy consists of eight steps. Patrick and Erickson outline and explain each step in the second chapter of their excellent Health Status and Health Policy. The Strategy, or plan to equitably allocate medical resources, goes beyond cost-utility analysis in several ways that have significant implications for policy making. "By requiring that policy analysts identify the concerns of various stakeholders in the decision process, the Strategy provides a systematic way of incorporating the important cultural and political factors that influence the allocation of resources across health interventions." In addition to input from physicians and administrators, the St
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Policy Strategy, American Canadian, Healthy People, Hippocratic Oath, Services Act, Insurance Program, Allocation Strategy, Patrick Erickson, South America, Act Medicare, health care, medical care, health insurance, healthy people, quality life, cost containment, resource allocation strategy, patrick erickson, care system, resource allocation, allocation strategy, health resource allocation, health care system, healthy people 2000, rationing health care,
Approximate Word count = 2810
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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