Efficient and Fair Healthcare Rationing

Abstract

The rationing of healthcare resources has emerged as an important issue, which has been discussed by medical experts, policy-makers, and the general public. We consider a rationing problem where medical units are to be allocated to patients. Each unit is reserved for one of several categories, and each category has a priority ranking over the patients. We present a class of allocation rules that respect the priorities, comply with the eligibility requirements, allocate the largest feasible number of units, and do not penalize agents for rising in the priority ranking of a category. The rules characterize all possible allocations that satisfy the first three properties and are polynomial-time computable.