Health Care Technology and the Inevitability of Resource Allocation and Rationing Decisions. Part II

Abstract

Federal policy makers are being confronted with increasingly critical issues of resource allocation to and within the health care sector. Contending that the problems which have faced the End Stage Renal Disease Program are only symptomatic of more widespread problems that flow from expensive new biomedical technologies and from a traditional national commitment to the prolongation of life at any cost, the author addresses the question of how needed health care macroallocation and microallocation decisions are likely to be made. He discusses the use of cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analysis in assessing health practices and technologies, and considers general guidelines to be used in deciding whether to treat individual patients. (KIE abstract)