Even as New Jersey motorists were fueling up with relative ease after a gas-rationing system was put in place on Nov. 3, New York drivers waited in long lines until similar gas-rationing was instituted in the city on Nov. 8.
Although this approach has been demonised in America it merely makes explicit the rationing in any medical system through the decisions of insurers and funders.
Price rationing and a functioning price system are the clear-cut winners for maximizing benefits between producers and consumers when these two sides freely and willingly engage in market behavior.
The point of managed care was to introduce a degree of rationing into a health-care system that, by the late 1980s, was suffering from inflation of 15% a year or even more.
"The current system is dogged by means-testing, a postcode lottery of charges, a rationing of services and poor standards and nothing in the plan looks like it will address any of these concerns, " its general secretary Dot Gibson said.