Background Priority setting in publicly financed healthcare systems should be guided by ethical norms and other considerations viewed as socially valuable, and we find several different approaches for how such norms and considerations guide priorities in healthcare decision-making. Common to many of these approaches is that interventions are ranked in relation to each other, following the appli...

Healthcare costs are unsustainable. The authors propose a solution to control costs without rationing (deliberate withholding of effective care) or payment reductions to doctors and hospitals. Three physician-led strategies comprise this solution: reduce (1) overuse of health services, (2) preventable complications and (3) waste within healthcare processes. These challenges know no borders.

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 ...

In the literature on the subject there is a trend towards understanding the idea of rationing in healthcare very broadly, to include any form of restriction in supply. It is suggested in this paper that there are good reasons to resist this move, since it would both render the concept redundant through being trivially true and displace an earlier, egalitarian one that retains great moral signif...

Several ethicists have defended the use of responsibility-based criteria in healthcare rationing. Yet this article we outline two challenges to implementation rationing policies. These are, namely, that responsibility for past behavior can diminish as an agent changes, and blame come apart from responsibility. suggest it is more difficult hold someone responsible health related actions than pro...

AIM To explore healthcare decision makers' perceptions about public involvement in setting priorities for high-cost medications (HCMs) in public hospitals in Australia. METHODS In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 24 decision-makers (executive directors of hospitals, area health service managers, directors of hospital pharmacy departments and senior medical doctors) in a S...

Healthcare (including public health) is special because it protects normal functioning, which in turn protects the range of opportunities open to individuals. I extend this account in two ways. First, since the distribution of goods other than healthcare affect population health and its distribution, I claim that Rawls's principles of justice describe a fair distribution of the social determina...