Rationing in Medicine

"The Crisis of the Welfare State" has become a fashionable topic for research projects, academic conferences and political debates in recent decades. A quarter of a century after the emergence of the so-called "health-care cost explosion", there is a widespread belief that in the issue of health care financing the worst times are still ahead of us. Nobody believes that it will be possible to place an ever increasing burden on future working generations without risking their adverse reaction. One of the main solutions proposed for averting the imminent health care crisis comes under the heading of "rationing" and thus - not surprisingly - the world-wide debate on whether and how to ration medical care has become very lively recently. The present volume is the result of a conference devoted to the topic of Rationing in Medicine that was organized by the Europäische Akademie zur Erforschung von Folgen wissenschaftlich-technischer Entwicklungen Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler GmbH. One of the purposes of this volume is to contribute to a clarification of the concept of rationing and its possible implementations and thereby to help the participants in the debate to avoid further unnecessary confusion. Authors from the disciplines of medicine, philosophy, economics and law as well as practitioners of health care itself and from the field of health-care financing have contributed to this volume.