Abstract

Rationing life and death
Kirp, David L. | March 5, 1990 issue

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Last spring the top public health official in California's Alameda County, Dave Kears, announced a first-in-the-nation effort to come up with a local strategy for rationing health care. Health departments elsewhere, most of them strapped for funds after years of cutbacks, took notice. By summer, though, the experiment had collapsed in a storm of accusations and ill will. What occurs in Alameda County, and in public hospitals and clinics across the country, isn't rationing by rule but an invisible rationing carried out by nurses and doctors. They are constantly obliged by constraints of time and space and staff--constraints built into an underfunded system--to decide whom to help and whom not to help, just as on a battlefield.

See Also:

HEALTH facilities; MEDICAL care; PUBLIC hospitals; PUBLIC health; ALAMEDA (Calif.); CALIFORNIA; UNITED States
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