ABSTRACT
Economic incentives provide important mechanisms for influencing use of health services and may offer some solutions to the problem of rising health-care costs. For a number of reasons, age rationing of health care is not a preferable approach to solving the problems of health-care expenditure growth. The broader the health-care system controlled by the public sector, the broader will be the impact of changes in policy designed to reeducate Americans on the use of health-care services or to control costs. Policy changes that affect all Americans equally would more likely be viewed as fairer, and even small shifts in attitudes over time could accumulate into an altered view of the American health-care system. The reforms in Medicare and changes in other third-party payment plans must be viewed as an ongoing activity rather than casting in stone another mechanism that will quickly become dated.
