There is much discussion, and considerable trepidation, concerning what reforming our health care system will produce, and what role bureaucrats might have in the allocation of resources to individual patients. That’s a wordy way to say it. The simple way: People have questions about rationing medical care.
Rationing is the process of allocating scarce resources which are insufficient to fully satisfy existing demand for the resources. Rationing is when the average family of four needs 140 gallons of gasoline each month to go about their business as usual, but some authority limits them to 110 gallons per month. That’s easy to understand.
In the realm of the delivery of medical care, rationing can be harder to detect. A physician might silently opt not to order a test because he knows there is only a very slight chance that the order would be approved by the insurance company, or by a medicare administrator. An insurance company might refuse to authorize a procedure because they stall classify it as an experimental therapy. Are those cases of rationing? I believe you could make a case that they are, but Michael Kinsley has a simpler way to look at it in this column:
Here is a handy-dandy way to determine whether the failure to order some exam or treatment constitutes rationing: If the patient were the president, would he get it? If he’d get it and you wouldn’t, it’s rationing.
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