The director of the Hastings Center reviews eight books published between 1986 and 1988 that address the problem of how the United States can devise a health care policy that provides adequate care at an affordable price. In his own discussion of the issue, the author emphasizes that the failure of every effort to contain costs points toward rationing as the only feasible solution, but that this will be difficult to achieve because public opinion resists such measures and retains high expectations about health care while refusing to pay for it. Rather than working harder to come up with a technical solution, we must recognize that the problems and contradictions in our health care system are fundamentally moral ones which require us to revise our commitment to individualism and our massive denial of the reality of growing scarcity. (KIE abstract)
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Callahan et al. (1988) studied this question.