Health care rationing: systems, ethics, and policy implications

Health Care Rationing

How Health Care Rationing Could Improve the Health of the U.S. Population

Health care rationing has often been viewed as something horrific and voiced in the American media as a scare tactic by politicians. For instance, in September 2009 former U.S. vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin claimed that reforms proposed by the Obama administration would bring "rationing" into the American medical system (Hoffman, 2013). However, Palin's claims are rather short sited. In fact, every medical system in the world is rationed or limited in one way or another by its capabilities. For example, Harvard Medical School researchers released a study concluding that 45,000 Americans die every year because they lack health insurance and access to health care (Hoffman, 2013). The medical system does not provide services for many individuals and this could be considered a rationing of health care services.

Cardiovascular disease, cancer, and diabetes now cause 70% of U.S. deaths and account for nearly 75% of health care expenditures and many modifiable risk factors for chronic diseases are not being addressed adequately in the U.S. system (Marvasti & Stafford, 2012). If you looked at the U.S. healthcare system in terms of its capabilities, its resources could be better utilized by investing them into prevention as opposed to acute treatment. Thus rationing of acute treatment services in order to shift these resources into preventative measures could improve the overall health of the society by leaps and bounds. Many treatable diseases are now essentially ignored until they reach the point in which the patient must be hospitalized and the costs of healthcare are at their highest. Yet if the system rationed some of its resources and invested these resources into areas that offered greater returns on their investment then the levels of public health in America could improve radically in a short period of time.