Making Medical Spending Decisions

This is a fresh and comprehensive exploration of how health care rationing decisions are made. The author compares patients paying out of pocket, centralized authorities setting limits on what doctors can do and what insurance will pay, and motivating physicians to make these decisions at the bedside. His analysis of the political economics, ethics, and legality of each of these social mechanisms for making medical spending decisions reveals that none is uniformly superior, each is better suited for certain decisions than others and so a mix of all three is inevitable.