Pricing Life: Why It's Time for Health Care Rationing

By Peter A. Ubel

Book Overview

Although managed health care is a hot topic, too few discussions focus on health care rationing - who lives and who dies, death versus dollars. In this book physician and bioethicist Peter A. Ubel argues that physicians, health insurance companies, managed care organizations and governments need to consider the cost-effectiveness of many new health care technologies. In particular, they need to think about how best to ration health care. Ubel believes that standard medical training should provide physicians with the expertise to decide when to withhold health care from patients. He discusses the moral questions raised by this position, and by health care rationing in general. He incorporates ethical arguments about the appropriate role of cost-effectiveness analysis in health care rationing, empirical research about how the general public wants to ration care, and clinical insights based on his practice of general internal medicine. Straddling the fields of ethics, economics, research psychology and clinical medicine, he moves the debate forward from whether to ration to how to ration. The discussion is enlivened by actual case studies.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262210169
• ISBN13: 9780262210164
• Release Date: November 1999
• Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 1.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Important information

Dr. Peter Ubel has written and important and useful book. He describes very clearly how medical care in the U.S. is already being rationed--even though we might not call it 'rationing,' or even realize it. He gives clear examples of how that process is being taken place; the arguments for and against it; and a very coherent argument that medical rationing will continue, and grow, because it is economically inevitable.This book is important because it tells the reader that rationing will take place--with or without an informed patient role. It is up to those who receive medical care to understand what's at stake to make sure they do play an active part in the decision-making process.The book is very clearly written, but more examples, particularly in the latter part of the book, would make is more readable.