ABSTRACT
As patient-centered care (PCC) from Chapter 5 and wellness from Chapter 6 are closely related topics, so are the topics of this chapter, reconfiguring health insurance, and the next chapter, healthcare trade-offs. Addressing the latter set of topics requires considering important questions, such as how much healthcare can the country afford, and how should healthcare resources be allocated? If resources are unlimited, everyone could have any healthcare procedure they desire and, for that matter, anything else they want from luxury cars to the finest cuisine. There would be no difficult healthcare decisions and no trade-offs. Unfortunately and in spite of what some people would like to believe, the United States does not have unlimited resources for healthcare or any other aspect of people’s lives. So, the United States must find ways to use resources more effectively and allocate them in a well-reasoned manner. The country must come to grips with the fact that resource allocation is a polite way to say that healthcare must be rationed; in other words, someone must evaluate trade-offs and make difficult decisions about who gets care and who does not. Patients, not government or insurance companies, are in the best position to examine costs and benefits and make trade-offs and, through this process, to ration healthcare.
