Visibility and the just allocation of health care: a study of age-rationing in the British National Health Service

Abstract

The British National Health Service (BNHS) was founded, to quote Minister of Health Aneurin Bevan, to 'universalize the best'. Over time, however, financial constraints forced the BNHS to turn to incrementalist budgeting, to rationalize care and to ask its practitioners to act as gatekeepers. Seeking a way to ration scarce tertiary care resources, BNHS gatekeepers began to use chronological age as a rationing criterion. Age-rationing became the 'done thing' without explicit policy directives and in a manner largely invisible to patients, to Parliament, and to the public. The invisibility of the practice, however, violates the publicity principle that John Rawls and other philosophers believe essential to fairness. BNHS invisible age-rationing practices are thus a test case of the principle that fairness presupposes publicity; they raise the question: is it possible to preserve equitability in a system that uses non-public criteria to allocate scarce resources? To seek an answer, published data on access to end-stage renal disease (ESRD) treatment in Britain and the European Community (EC) are analysed. Among the findings are: that BNHS age-rationing acts as an excuse for denying care to those most likely to need ESRD treatment; and is, moreover, arbitrary and inequitable. It is further argued that no age-rationing policy can sustain visibility, and that, if the BNHS is to be fair to its patients, it must reform its present age-rationing practices, replacing them by a publicly visible, outcome-based rationing policy that rations either in terms of QALYs or triage categories.