The rationing of health care services: The case of Alameda County, California

✍ Scribed by Kent C. Sasse

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1990
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 649 KB
• Volume: 2
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0956-2737
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00057950

✦ Synopsis

Since rationing health care services has become an extremely serious political and ethical strategy for the United States, individual states, and counties, it is inevitable that rationing strategies will be implemented in our Nation's seven thousand hospitals. Indeed, the process has already begun in a large number of U.S. hospitals, and Long-Term Care Facilities. Hospital policies as well as individual patient diagnostic and treatment decisions compel members of Hospital Ethics Committees to begin to analyze the ethical dimensions of serious rationing decisions and policies. The SPECIAL ARTICLE by Kent Sasse, a medical student in the University of California, Berkeley/UCSF Joint Medical Program, not only presents a lucid account of one California county's struggle, but also by its very appearance here indicates that the problem of rationing health care services is of deep concern to medical students who are preparing to enter the medical profession and who, in all likelihood, will be appointed to a hospital's medical staff.