ABSTRACT
Rationing is usually thought to pose a moral dilemma between meeting the needs of the individual patient and attending to the welfare of the larger society. Rationing will be an essential, constitutive part of any successful attempt of people to control the resources of their lives. People may well agree, even for their own cases, to restrict some very high ticket items or diagnostic procedures of modest nominal cost that only rarely uncover actually treatable problems. In a very important and relevant sense, pension benefits are real costs. The common argument among economists then simply notes that though someone, through taxes or premiums, pays pension benefits to someone else and a pension is thus a cost of the payer, "society" incurs no net cost. In addition to the objection that pension benefits are not real costs, one also hears objections to the moral propriety of counting pensions or later health-care expenditures as costs of life-saving.
