Rationing health care in the welfare state: three policies.

Three policies of health care rationing are discussed. The premise underlying their analysis is that all welfare systems must ration health care. This raises the question as to how the problem ought best to be resolved. But before thinking about normatively appealing answers it might be helpful to study how the problem is dealt with in the real world. For such a study brings to light several advantages and drawbacks of various rationing schemes which would be hard to consider in the abstract alone, but whose knowledge may be highly relevant for any designation of adequate solutions.