Essay On Health Care Rationing

Distribution of health care resources is a highly debated topic, and many have suggested that at the core of this distribution is rationing. According to Scheunemann & White (2011), rationing is withholding or restriction of potential beneficial treatments or access to medical services via gatekeeper controls, controlled distribution, national budgeting, government-set prices, and provider fees. Healthcare rationing exists in the US healthcare system, and in many forms. Rationing in the US is a bottom-up, decentralized policy that occurs in both the private and public health care sectors (Hoffman, 2013).
The government, insurers, drug companies, and individuals ration health care mainly on the ground of cost, the insurance coverage, and the ability to pay. Rationing by the ability to pay is the most common; however, rationing by race, region and address, employment and occupation, and parental status and age are also familiar to many Americans. Rationing is practiced in ways both official and unofficial, intentional and unintentional, detectable and undetectable; therefore, the way of
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) prohibited such practices of rationing; however, while the ACA actually contested the rationing of health care by eliminating the pre-existing medical condition exclusions, it also created gatekeepers such as Accountable Care Organizations, Health Maintenance Organizations, insurance companies, and other professional organizations that have a power to control costs that, in turn, creates rationing, in this case, official. The ACA’s strategy is aimed on shifting from fee-for-service model to a model that rewards healthcare providers for cutting costs and rationing care (Randall,