Restructuring, rationing or researching diabetes care

Rationing and critical care medicine.

As healthcare expenditures have continued to grow in the United States and elsewhere, the demand for cost-cutting measures has increased. This has led many to wonder if we are, in fact, rationing health care. Critical care is characterized by very high expenditures on a relatively few number of patients, many of whom do not survive, and it is therefore a likely place where rationing could occur...

Rational requesting or rationing testing?

T he UK government has acknowledged that up to 70% of medical diagnoses now rely on pathology laboratory analyses. One consequence of such reliance is an ever increasing laboratory workload, usually, in National Health Service laboratories, at a rate in excess of the financial resources to support it. It follows that this demand can only be serviced by increased efficiency. One area where deman...

Rationing health care in Canada.

Canada has been able to develop a fairly successful system of healthcare rationing by balancing the conflicting concerns of equal access and cost efficiency, federal funding and provincial control, and public sector management and private sector provision. Financial constraints limit the kinds of services included within the notion of equal access, however, forcing healthcare providers to make ...

Health Care Rationing: A Critical Evaluation

Governments should reduce prices before rationing care.

I welcome the Comment by Didier Raoult (Jan 9, p 104), which proposes the post-Darwinist concept of the evolutionary pathway as a rhizome instead of a tree, with inheritance occurring not only vertically but also laterally. He rightly addresses how the genomic revolution has forced us to reconsider the way we describe evolution. Perhaps one of the most important unresolved issues in the study o...