[Democratic institutional design in health care priority setting and rationing]

Abstract

Decisions on priority setting and rationing in health care have both informational and distributional aspects, which is why they require expert knowledge and specialised bodies on the one hand and democratic consent on the other hand. The paper presents normative criteria for the evaluation and empirical categories for the description and comparison of respective bodies. As procedural decisions always have implications for resulting distributional decisions, the bodies charged with priority setting and rationing decisions must be subject to democratic institutional design. (As supplied by publisher).