Health-Care Rationing: Critical Features, Ordinary Language, and Meaning

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to re-visit how rationing is defined for a health-care context, Two reasons justify returning to this topic. First, the variability as to how rationing has been defined in the legal, medical, and philosophical literature justifies a careful examination to identify its critical features. Second, I believe that if the definitions typically employed in the literature, several of which are discussed below, are compared to those that would be offered by the American public, ethically weighty dissimilarities would be apparent. Disparate characterizations are worrisome because serious “disconnections” between policymakers’ understandings, rhetoric, and priorities and those of the general public are more likely.