The cost-benefit approach.

There are not, and probably never will be, enough resources to satisfy the community's desires for things that improve the quality of life. This poses the necessity for choice, and hence the consideration of priorities. In the medical field two distinct kinds of choice arise: one at the clinical level and the other in the planning process. At the point of contact with a particular patient, a doctor's duty is to do the best he can for that patient within the confines of existing knowledge and facilities. In the planning process, on the other hand, the concern is with large groups of potential patients at some future date, and with decisions that will to some extent determine what the confines of existing knowledge and facilities will be at that date. The planning process is my concern here and, in particular, one important, and increasingly wide-spread, approach to the problems that arise within it, namely, cost-benefit analysis.