Americans find certain issues in public policy much easier to ignore than to confront. The necessity of rationing health care is one such issue. Because Americans believe that access to health care is a basic right,1 we, as a society, have avoided facing the hard fact that it is not feasible to provide, on demand, all needed medical procedures to every individual who could potentially benefit f...

Housing, health care, and education are often rationed in the sense that the allocation process involves non-market mechanisms. We study rationing in a market in which some buyers face binding wealth constraints and resale is permitted. Buyers with a high willingness-to-pay for a good but a low ability-to-pay may not acquire it in a free market. Rationing gives these buyers a chance to acquire ...

Physicians are often asked to be "gatekeepers," determining their patients' access to medical therapies and technologies. At the same time, most physicians have been taught that they should act as patient advocates, pursuing patients' best interests regardless of cost. This paper reviews moral arguments ethicists have made for and against "bedside rationing." It argues that healthcare rationing...

Despite a growing global commitment to the provision of antiretroviral therapy (ART), its availability is still likely to be less than the need. This imbalance raises ethical dilemmas about who should be granted access to publicly-subsidized ART programmes. This paper reviews the eligibility and targeting criteria used in four case-study countries at different points in the scale-up of ART, wit...

Using a dynamic model of a step-by-step innovation race between financially constrained firms, I study how financial constraints affect innovation activity. The novel theoretical results derive from an analysis of the interaction between the incentive effect of competition on innovation and the effect competition has on the degree of credit rationing. I find that the negative effect of financia...

What does it mean to be a ‘‘just’’ and ‘‘caring’’ society when we have only limited resources to meet virtually unlimited health care needs? In Just Caring. Health Care Rationing and Democratic Deliberation Leonard Fleck identifies health care rationing as the moral problem of contemporary health care. At present, millions of Americans go without health insurance, thousands of whom die prematur...

The paper revisits Stiglitz and Weiss (1981)’ seminal Credit Rationing result in more detail. It has often been argued that rationing is irrelevant since a) it only pertains to specific assumptions about the quality of investment projects and b) it is eliminated by offering screening contracts to borrowers. The paper argues the opposite. It shows that Credit Rationing holds for a wide range of ...

This article focuses on rationing of expensive medical care in the Czech Republic. It distinguishes between political and clinical decision levels and reviews the debate in the Western literature on explicit and implicit rules. The contemporary situation of the Czech health care system is considered from this perspective. Rationing reoccurred in the mid 90s after the shift in health care financ...

This article focuses on rationing of expensive medical care in the Czech Republic. It distinguishes between political and clinical decision levels and reviews the debate in the Western literature on explicit and implicit rules. The contemporary situation of the Czech health care system is considered from this perspective. Rationing reoccurred in the mid 90s after the shift in health care financ...