Blackwell Reference Online

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Resources, including health care resources, are almost always scarce, and they somehow have to be allocated. Often, though, we do not perceive them as either scarce or allocated, particularly when no person is making conscious decisions about how those resources get distributed. Instead some structure in which we work or live just handles the distribution without us having to think about it. When in the US, for example, a much greater volume of health care services is delivered to well-insured citizens than to those who are un- or under-insured, it is the structure of health insurance and financing that explains much about how the allocation comes about, without anyone making “decisions” to allocate more to the well-insured than the relatively uninsured. A distribution like this could perhaps be regarded as still an “allocation” of health care, but the usual sense of that term involves more conscious decisions by particular persons or groups of people who direct different amounts of care to different people. This entry will focus only on allocation in this latter sense: the relatively deliberate, conscious distribution of care to different persons. Even among such consciously distributed care, however, we should notice a large segment that we still would not count as “allocated.” Competent health care professionals are always consciously aiming care differentially at different patients, ... log in or subscribe to read full text