A middle way for rationing healthcare resources

Healthcare Reform, Rationing,

Healthcare reform and rationing have become almost household words in many Western countries, including Israel. The public, health professionals, and political leaders are united in the belief that a serious problem exists in providing comprehensive healthcare to the entire population at an affordable and politically acceptable price. It is important to preserve our sense of proportion. Most of...

Rationing healthcare: who's responsible?

Let’s start with the easier vignette: Vignette 3 illustrates the failure of the physician to discuss transition to hospice care. As the authors describe, a dying man with pancreatic cancer “had an ECOG performance status of 3 at his last visit...you were to see him again in clinic next week to discuss hospice....” Not making time for this important communication at his last visit was a tremendo...

Rationing Expensive Lifesaving Medical Resources

Is rationing the only way out?

In 2005, the leadership of the Department of Cardiology at Children’s Hospital Boston became convinced that serious health care reform was inevitable in this country, and that “health care reform” was simply an alias for reducing costs. We began to prepare for that inevitable change in the landscape by attempting to create cost-effective clinical care algorithms for the outpatient department in...

Efficiently Rationing Resources for Grid and P2P Computing

As Grid and P2P computing become more and more popular, many schedule algorithms based on economics rather than traditional pure computing theory have been proposed. Such algorithms mainly concern balancing resource supply and resource demand via economic measures. As we know, fairness and efficiency are two conflicting goals. In this paper, we argue that overbooking resources can greatly impro...