Priority Setting in the Age of Genomics
Transcription
Priority Setting in the Age of Genomics
Jacobs University Bremen Priority Setting in the Age of Genomics Hartmut Kliemt Priorisierung in der Medizin FOR 655 Nr. 01 / 2007 Campus Ring 1 28759 Bremen Germany www.jacobs-university.de FOR 655 Working Paper serves to disseminate the research results of work in progress prior to publication to encourage academic debate. Copyright remains with the authors. Die Reihe „Priorisierung in der Medizin“ umfasst Arbeits- und Forschungsberichte der DFG Forschergruppe FOR655 „Priorisierung in der Medizin: eine theoretische und empirische Analyse unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Gesetzlichen Krankenversicherung (GKV). Die Berichte und weitere Informationen zu der Forschergruppe können abgerufen, werden unter: http://www.for655.de oder http://www.priorisierung-in-der-medizin.de The series „Priorisierung in der Medizin“ consists of working papers and research reports of the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, i.e., German Research Foundation) Research Group FOR655 „Priorisierung in der Medizin: eine theoretische und empirische Analyse unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Gesetzlichen Krankenversicherung (GKV).(Prioritizing in Medicine: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis in Consideration of the Public Health Insurance System) Reports and further information can be found at http://www.for655.de or http://www.priorisierung-in-der-medizin.de Impressum: Campus Ring 1 28759 Bremen Germany www.jacobs-university.de ISSN 1866-0290 www.for655.de │www.priorisierung-in-der-medizin.de Priority Setting in the Age of Genomics Hartmut Kliemt* Frankfurt School of Finance and Management Since resources are scarce priorities in medical care must be set. This cannot be done in terms of science. It has to be based on non-medical values of a rather broad kind even though medical information does play a role for priority rankings. The question to what extent genomics – as broadly understood – may play a role in this context is explored with the result that transparent urgency based priority setting and withholding of care will become less easy in the age of genomics but not impossible. As a thought experiment, though not in practice, it is conceivable that the GNP of an advanced economy be spent on health care services. All these services would still have some – though rather low – net benefit for the patients on which the money is spend. Therefore eliminating pure waste will not impose limits on spending. It is necessary to deliberately set some limits on the guarantees of health services financed from the public purse. It is within this context that the ascent of genomics must be seen, too. It puts another threat on our ability to do set limits. Moral and political pressures to expand health care provision beyond reasonable boundaries might be fuelled by increasing genomic knowledge. __________________________________ Prof. Dr. Hartmut Kliemt Frankfurt School of Finance and Management Sonnemannstr. 9 - 11 D-60314 Frankfurt phone: 069/154008-0 e-mail: h.kliemt@frankfurt-school.de FOR655 – Nr. 01 / 2007 Priority Setting in the Age of Genomics This paper inquires how genomics may possibly affect what I believe is the best way to solve the containment problem: urgency based priority setting among standardized diagnosis treatment pairs in a publicly financed rationing system. In the next section I will sketch what I mean by that (2.). Then I will scrutinize how this special form of priority setting might conceivably be affected by the ascent of genomics (3.). The paper ends with brief concluding remarks on the future of public health care in a liberal Western political order (4.). But before going on to the potentially problematic aspects of genomics it deserves to be emphasized that we all may potentially profit from the ascent of genomics. As patients we may live longer and more healthy lives for what is in store. It would be foolish not to look at potential problems, though. As in the old wisdom that in securing the peace you have to prepare for war you should always prepare for the bad to secure the good (see on this already Hume, D. (1777/1985)). 2. Public health provision as rationing 2.1 Rationing Public health care is based on rationing or the assignment of limited quantities of an important medical good or service of fixed quality for personal use below market clearing prices. This understanding of rationing identifies public health care provision with rationing. It is different from the conventional one which has it that rationing amounts to the withholding of care. But the latter is obviously mistaken. Nobody would queue up for a good or service in order that this good or service be withheld if he or she would reach the head of the queue. The whole point of queuing is that you are willing to pay the non-monetary price of waiting time or other inconveniences to get access to a good or service. The latter must be granted below market clearing price because otherwise you would not pay the additional prize of queuing. To get something below market clearing prices is always advantageous for the beneficiary. As opposed to a present personally assigned to her a beneficiary of rationing will not have a monopoly on the receiving end. In rationing those granting the rations will in general want to treat all potential beneficiaries according to general (impersonal) rules. This is particularly true if the rations are publicly funded (at least in part). Because we are willing to give away the rations of the good or service only in some limited quantities competition among the potential beneficiaries emerges. The very fact that assignment takes place below market clearing prices – in the moment of assignment – induces excess demand. Without the countervailing force of full opportunity costs and the monetary price representing them that form of assignment will make the scarcity subjectively more strongly felt. To put it very bluntly: if you can buy a Picasso painting or a Rolls Royce car at the same price and opt against the Picasso and for the Rolls Royce then the frustration of not getting the Picasso is counterbalanced by the 2 FOR655 – Nr. 01 / 2007 Hartmut Kliemt satisfaction of driving the car. But if you were unlucky and did not get the single discount Picasso offered by Wal Mart in its latest advertisement campaign for a thousand dollars and thus far below the market clearing price you will be frustrated more strongly. The countervailing satisfaction is not a Rolls Royce but only what ever it is the $ 1000 can buy. Now, there are not many offerings of Discount-Picasso paintings in our societies. But health care rations are offered in civilized Western societies by the state or state sponsored authorities as guarantees of minimum care. Here scarcity is felt quite strongly by those whose demand is not satisfied at the prices charged (which may be nil anyhow). Subsidies induce special forms of frustration. And that frustration will even increase if we fulfil other requirements of a Western legal order under rule of law in particular those concerning the definiteness and transparency of rules regulating resource access. Scarcity will, as a rule, be felt more if the rationing is transparent. Rationing should, as I suggest, be called “transparent” if the assigned services and goods are provided in a standardized way according to rules open to judicial review. In a public health system where redistribution is financed by coercive taxes it seems clearly obligatory that the system be transparent. But also within the sphere of private health maintenance organizations and other healthcare providers the two parties of the contract will insist on transparency. The one-party would like to know exactly what its obligations the other one what its rights are. There is a demand for transparency in the public sphere as well. Though it cannot express itself in free contracting it should be expected to be present as well. It is also worth noting that quite contrary to the conventional wisdom which identifies rationing in medicine with withholding care there is a private demand for rationing. If somebody buys an insurance contract this amounts to buying into a rationing scheme. This is s because in the moment of need she will not have to pay the “quid pro quo” of the service she will receive as a person (very instructive on quid pro quo reasoning, Weizsäcker, C. C. v. (1985) and rather extreme but very interesting on this Quante, M. and S. Wiedebusch (2006)). In the moment of need not her willingness to pay but the need will command the goods and services she is in need of. This is the whole point of insurance: In the moment of need you want to get access to resources due to a contingent contract defining a claim to a ration that is assigned to you without requiring direct payment. That we have the power to set priorities at all in a public health care system clearly depends on rationing. As opposed to a purely contractual assignment of resources for personal use the supplier of rations can decide whom to give what in which order. Priority setting is possible only if we are willing to assign rations below market clearing prices. One cannot reasonably intend to discriminate by other than market forces and nevertheless let the market work “it” out. Under free contracting and market clearing prices society or rather its agents would not have discriminatory power (or only at the margin if two are willing to bid the same). Asking the market clearing price implies to FOR655 – Nr. 01 / 2007 3 Priority Setting in the Age of Genomics go with the highest or lowest bidder depending on which side of the market one is (which incidentally forms one of the reasons why the Freiburg school of political economy always insisted that the main achievement of market competition is the control of power; see Eucken, W. (1982)). 2.2 Priority setting The kind of priority setting I am interested in henceforth is that of a (diagnosis, treatment)-pair priority ordering within the public sphere. By such a priority ordering I understand a complete, total-reflexive, and transitive relation among (diagnosis, treatment)-pairs. I will also refer to this as a medical priority ordering. Let us say that a medical priority ordering is preference based if it is determined by pairwise comparisons of (diagnosis, treatment)-pairs according to the views of several stakeholders, in particular, physicians, patients and observing citizens. The orderings of different groups of stakeholders need not coincide. The stakeholders typically are asked which of two (diagnosis, treatment)-pairs is to be provided to a patient “at the opportunity cost” of not providing it to another patient. This way of questioning is rather specific in disregarding monetary costs and numbers of affected individuals and in that sense quite alien to some of the views on rational priority setting in a cost benefit framework presently favored by many experts and politicians. The determination of a preference based priority ordering in this way will be called urgency based. Within the legal order of the Western type rule of law principles are central. This brings into play requirements of definiteness of resource assignments. It makes what I call transparent rationing and priority setting in medicine a necessity for public health provision. On the one hand, this is so because the subsidies are financed by coercive taxation. On the other hand, the discriminatory assignment is also using the fundamental coercive power of the state and therefore needs to be open to judicial review. As far as I can see, the necessary transparency cannot be brought about in ways other than by standardization of (diagnosis, treatment)-pairs with respect to quantity and quality of diagnostic effort and treatment (see on standardization Dietrich, F., M. Imhoff and H. Kliemt (2004), Kliemt, H. (2006)). Within the approach favored here the priority among those standardized pairs will follow from an urgency based medical priority order. Finally, because not all medical care expected to be of net benefit for the patient can be paid for defining a cut off point in the priority order is required. This is not a medical but a political issue. Below the cut off point no service will be financed from the public purse while all (diagnosis, treatment)-pairs above the cut off point will be provided below market clearing – and typically at zero monetary prices – and paid for from taxes (or tax like schemes as in German mandatory “insurance”). Priority setting should basically be political not medical and the basic ethical concern should be political stability rather than health (see Kliemt, H. (2006)). However, 4 FOR655 – Nr. 01 / 2007 Hartmut Kliemt political stability does not require to guarantee every medical service that would be of medical utility for the recipient. Quite in line with urgency based priority setting we can and should rely on the principle of acuteness in priority setting here: the more likely, the closer in time, and the more serious a risk for life or limb is, the more intense is the political obligation to guarantee the assignment of rations of health care; the less acute the more easily can additional care that goes beyond the assigned rations be „withheld“. Setting limits in health care provision becomes but is also possible only within the constraints of observing the principle of acuteness. Observing the principle of acuteness has implications for the more or less expert-driven priority setting that is envisioned by public health officials and medical doctors almost across the board. It imposes a feasibility constraint on any form of priority setting. In political practice maximization of summed up qualys and other standard criteria tend to be overruled by acuteness considerations. This is clearly shown by the fate of the famous Oregon health plan. Once a person afflicted by a life threatening acute disease had a face and a name (the little boy patient to whom a very expensive last chance treatment with rather low success probability was “reasonably” withheld) the rational plan was not feasible anymore. We should not blame that on the irrationality of the public at large but rather on a deficiency in the priority setting mechanism itself. The principle of acuteness was not taken into account at all or not sufficiently. The advantage of an urgency based priority setting is that it more or less automatically will come to a priority ordering that can be transparent and at the same time be sustainable once the veil of ignorance about who is afflicted in which ways is taken away. For, if we would ask the right questions on alternatives in such a setting and describe them as choices also between concrete lives the principle of acuteness will automatically be factored in (numbers will count less, see Lübbe, W. (2004); Lübbe, W. (2005)). 2.3 Public health as an input into the production function for rule of law How does this all relate to genomics and its ascent? It is important to note here that in general preventive medicine can be limited according to the principle of acuteness. The illness to be prevented is not yet manifest and no treatment of acute symptoms necessary. In particular in cases of severe illness the person concerned is not yet in dire straits and therefore the rescue impulse that makes it publicly unavoidable to assist a concrete person in preventing severe and imminent danger does not kick in yet. This holds good for diagnostic effort in particular. Diagnostic effort can in general much more easily be withheld than treatment effort. Both aspects are already crucial in limiting public health care resource use today. But they will become much more crucial for that task if medical technology develops on as in the past. Though this development is on the personal level for each of us entirely desirable it is also absolutely desirable that it will not become a threat to the legal order FOR655 – Nr. 01 / 2007 5 Priority Setting in the Age of Genomics of a free Western society. At least if we take seriously the Rawlsian principle of the priority of liberty and if we also understand that liberty has to be protected in the presence of the state and its fundamental coercive power by that state itself, we have very good reasons to contain the size of the state (including the health care providing state). The development of medicine will, however, put some very serious strains on the ability to contain that size while maintaining transparent schemes of urgency based priority setting and the assignment of rations (see early on this point Buchanan, J. M. (1990)). Because transparency is itself important for rule of law and judicial review it can not easily be given up and should not be given up in liberal legal order of the Western type. Neither is it feasible to let concrete lives perish if they can be rescued at bearable costs. The belief in the legitimacy of the system would perish as well. However, if the costs of public health care expenditures expand beyond certain limits the political system based on inter-individual respect as expressed in the notion of the priority of liberty may go under, too. The preceding sketch of a system of transparent urgency based priority setting indicates how in principle setting limits would be possible without undermining the belief in the legitimacy of the legal order as a whole and without eroding its guiding principles from within. Guarantees that protect concrete individuals against imminent risks to life and limb could be universally provided and thereby a central input in the production function for maintaining the system of rights that form the core of a Western liberal political order. The issue I want to address next is whether the belief in the legitimacy of a Western legal system can be upheld at reasonable costs if genomic knowledge will considerably increase in scope and predictive validity. For instance, what will happen if additional information on risks is or can be provided to specific patients or groups thereof? Will they become organized and drive away any restrictions on spending that we might otherwise intend to impose? Let us for the sake of the argument assume that some of the wilder hopes about genetic knowledge and its accumulation will be fulfilled and reflect on the scenario then emerging. It will become apparent that the consequences will be less severe than might be feared. 3. Piercing the „veil of genomic ignorance“ Once sufficient genetic knowledge exists those afflicted by a disease may know that they incur a special risk beyond the general statistical risk affecting the population at large. In that sense genetic knowledge can single out those who will with higher likelihood than others be afflicted by the manifestation of a disease in the future. General statistical risks become concrete probabilistic (e.g. risk of breast cancer) or deterministic risks (e.g. Huntington’s Chorea) of specific groups who know of their specific condition. This knowledge sets them apart from the population at large. Though a disease may be nonacute the knowledge of its increased likelihood may become “acute” due to genomic 6 FOR655 – Nr. 01 / 2007 Hartmut Kliemt information. The concrete awareness of a specific likelihood in the present will affect individuals in ways differently than the awareness of a general likelihood to become a victim of a disease. More specifically speaking, due to genomic information (possibly large) groups of subjects can know in advance of a severe illness afflicting them with higher likelihood than others. These groups may have the ability to organize themselves as pressure groups. This as well as other effects raise the question of what the consequences for a priority setting scheme as envisioned above may be. Our ability to set limits to collective health care expenditures in ways compatible with rule of law and the priority of liberty in a Western type legal order may be negatively affected by the growth of genomic information along four dimensions: 1. A modified meaning of urgency and the relationship between statistical to concrete risks may emerge and become an obstacle to the implementation of transparent urgency based priority setting. 2. Creating private insurance markets may become problematic. 3. Admittance to the community may become dependent on the submission of genetic information. 4. Research funding and resource allocation to research projects may be influenced by external pressures. ad 1. As far as “acute awareness” that a specific severe disease is pending amounts almost to the same thing as the disease being acute, urgency based transparent priority setting may become difficult. At least in a way, the disease becomes “chronic” before symptoms show and the potential patient actually falls ill. Preventive measures – if prevention is possible – will receive higher priority than otherwise if specific groups of people know to be differentially afflicted by the likelihood of the disease actually becoming manifest in them. It is hard to say apriori what the empirical effects of genomics will be. But it seems quite plausible that the effects will depend on how much the probability of developing manifest symptoms rises by genetic knowledge. Before symptoms develop a disease will be treated more or less as if already manifest only if the conditional probability after genetic diagnosis is high. Moreover it seems necessary that the probability of preventing it some intervention or other must also be quite high if the knowledge of the increased probability of the disease to become manifest is to provide a strong motive for action. If both conditions are fulfilled the acute knowledge that the disease is pending may be quite similar to the knowledge that the disease is manifest. In short, the product of the probability of the preventive measure being effective and of the probability of the disease in the group differentially affected is presumably crucial. It is unclear, though, to what extent remoteness in time may act as a countervailing force here. My personal hunch is that remoteness in time will have a rather strong influence on the potentially ill as well as on observers. It will considerably decrease the urgency even of a preventive intervention. FOR655 – Nr. 01 / 2007 7 Priority Setting in the Age of Genomics If the conditional probability of the manifestation of the disease after genomic diagnosis becomes rather high and the “scare factor of the disease” (as in cancer cases) is high as well then this may possibly outweigh the effects of the remoteness of the manifestation. This may be so at least if there are preventive measures that can be applied with reasonable effort. But as can be seen from so many cases of diabetes where all it takes is loosing weight and having exercise to prevent its manifestation (and often even after manifestation) to eliminate or to reduce manifest symptoms the behavioural effects of knowledge may not be strong. Closeness in time will have a rather pronounced influence on how strongly the urgency of the claim for public assistance in prevention will be felt. Since there will be individuals around who are already manifestly ill public opinion may be mobilized to a much stronger extent also in favour of prevention than the inidivual patient for whom the manifestation of symptoms may still be quite uncertain, in all likelihood remote in time and cost him more effort than the bystanders who express their willingness to help often at practically zero costs to themselves. In general it seems that the ascent of genomics will not make an application of the principle of acuteness impossible. But it may make it more difficult to act accordingly in specific cases. As far as our ability to set limits to public health care expenditure is concerned there will be some cases of cost saving prevention but in general the effects of the growth of genomic knowledge will be cost increasing. How strongly these effects will be depends on the reliability of predictions, the probability that the disease will become symptomatically manifest, as well as the probability that preventive measures will work and can be administered without requiring too much activity on the side of the patients concerned. Moreover, the size of the concerned groups will be of great importance. In general we may assume, however, that most of the diagnoses based on genomics will concern diseases whose symptomatic manifestation is sufficiently remote in time and sufficiently stochastic for making the withholding of expensive preventive care viable. Transparent urgency based priority setting should remain possible and therefore setting limits on public health care expenditure within a liberal Western legal order, too. I think there should be much more empirical research on the political effects of genomic knowledge. This research, of course, is not medical research but research in the psychology of risk perception or, for that matter, political psychology. ad. 2 The very meaning of health insurance could conceivably become precarious with greater genomic knowledge (though in a very distant future). But this is very unlikely. There will not be many monogenetic and hardly many polygenetic diseases with a certain or almost certain manifestation of symptoms in the future. Therefore there will be still quite some scope for spreading risks among those differentially affected and insurance contracts. This would speak in favour of a health system that would provide basic guarantees to each citizen and finance the guarantees by taxes. Because the public good involved is the maintenance of the legal order itself rather than individual health this is more or less how it should be. For, if there is a public good involved whose production is a legitimate public concern and may legitimately be financed by 8 FOR655 – Nr. 01 / 2007 Hartmut Kliemt compulsory taxes then everybody should contribute as a taxpayer. If there is no such legitimate concern and consequently the application of fundamental coercive power to raise taxes rendered illegitimate then nobody should pay. Making contributions mandatory for some citizens while others may voluntarily contribute or not as presently in Germany is verging on the absurd (in that regard, of course, not very different from much of the rest of the tax system). The idea to provide a standard basic care package and to pay for its guarantee from the public purse seems reasonable in the age of genomics. It should be possible to use the principle of acuteness to define the basic package and to leave the rest to private responsibility. However, with increased genomic knowledge public health care provision might become increasingly outright re-distribution between the more and less healthy as opposed to the more and the less well to do. There will be much less uncertainty about the redistributional effects rendering “social solidarity” possibly more precarious than it would be otherwise. Again there will be a countervailing effect which is exerted by the presence of expressive voting behind the veil of insignificance in the voting booth (see on this Brennan, H. G. and J. M. Buchanan (1984), Brennan, H. G. and L. E. Lomasky (1989), Kliemt, H. (1986)). Since voters know that their vote will not tip the balance they can as well express “unselfishness”. By casting their vote for the good health care causes they can feel the warm glow of doing something good at the polls. This, of course, may also put the political ability of society to impose a cap on health care expenditures at risk. As far as this is concerned we can only hope that over the long haul a transparent rationing system that implements an urgency based medical priority ordering will be accepted. Whether this will lead to hard rationing, prohibiting in fact private additional health care provision and insurance in the name of equality or soft rationing that allows for differences remains to be seen. As adherents of the principles governing a Western liberal order we should hope that limiting public care will go along with the entitlement of citizens to use their own resources for improving their individual health care beyond the publicly guaranteed level. But whether that in fact will happen remains to be seen. ad 3. Admittance to the community may become increasingly health dependent in the future. This is, of course, not an entirely new development. For instance immigrants to the US have for a very long time been scrutinized concerning their state of health. There is some reason to assume that this kind of inquiry will be intensified in the future in the US and everywhere else around the world. The more expensive guarantees for medical care will be the more reluctant a society may become to grant access to outsiders. Therefore it seems rather safe to predict that immigration and granting full citizens’ rights will increasingly be made dependent on genomic testing. This is a side effect also of implementing universal coverage. Eugenics are lurking around the corner, too. Though the culprit is not genomics per se but rather our inability to set explicit limits to medical rations concerning newborn members of our societies it will presumably lead to problems in the more remote future. FOR655 – Nr. 01 / 2007 9 Priority Setting in the Age of Genomics PID (pre implantation diagnosis) and selective choice will become if not mandatory in certain cases clearly something that will be supported by increasingly many who observe that they themselves cannot anymore finance state of the art non-acute health care. The effects of our inability to set limits to collective state sponsored action and to privatize responsibilities will be exacerbated by genomics. ad 4. The knowledge of genomics may lead to a stronger democratic involvement into what kinds of research are to be sponsored from the public purse and which not. It seems, however, that this will not pose serious problems as long as private medical research and funding of that research will not be hampered by state regulations. 4. Concluding remarks Though it seems that limiting the guarantees of public health assistance will become politically infeasible to the extent the advance knowledge of a pending disease is treated equivalent to acuteness of the condition itself we may assume that such advance knowledge will in most relevant cases not be treated that way. Though in the age of genomics it becomes clearly more problematic to stick to the principle of acuteness it will not be impossible in particular if we factor in the effects of remoteness in time. There will be a tendency to identify acute knowledge of the differential probability to be subject to a disease in the future with acuteness of that disease itself. However, it seems likely that this will not prevail over the effects of remoteness in time – at least in those cases in which the product of the probabilities of the effectiveness of preventive measures and the conditional manifestation probability after genomic diagnosis is not too high. We cannot rule out that people may start to confuse acuteness of a threat to life or limb with acute knowledge that such a threat is pending. It seems, however, rather unlikely that this will in fact happen because the human weakness to give undue weight to what is close in time as opposed to the more remote will work in our favour here. Individuals who know that they will with differentially higher probability be afflicted by the manifestation of symptoms of a disease in the more distant future will emotionally distance themselves from that knowledge sufficiently as not to treat it in the same way as imminent dangers. So there is some chance that we will be able to implement a transparent system of public guarantees of health care provision according to an urgency passed priority order. Genomics will make it more difficult to go that route but it does not close of the possibility of a reasonable system of setting limits to public health care guarantees without putting the basic principles of a Western liberal legal order at risk. 10 FOR655 – Nr. 01 / 2007 Hartmut Kliemt *Author note First draft, July, 03, 2007. I am indebted to Norbert Paul and participants of the conference remaking the future of health care, June, 30 to July, 2007, Academy of science and literature, Mainz. References BRENNAN, H. G., and J. M. BUCHANAN (1984): "Voter Choice: Evaluating Political Alternatives," American Behavioral Scientist, 28, 185-201. BRENNAN, H. G., and L. E. LOMASKY (1989): Large Numbers, Small Costs - Politics and Process - New Essays in Democratic Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. BUCHANAN, J. M. (1990): Technological Determinism Despite the Reality of Scarcity. Little Rock: University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. DIETRICH, F., M. IMHOFF, and H. 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(2004): "Tödliche Entscheidung," Paderborn: Mentis. — (2005): "Das Problem Der Gleichheit in Der "Numbers" Debatte," in Gleichheit Und Gerechtigkeit in Der Modernen Medizin, ed. by O. Rauprich, G. Marckmann, and J. Vollmann. Paderborn: Mentis, 105-125. QUANTE, M., and S. WIEDEBUSCH (2006): "Overcoming the Shortage of Transplantable Organs: Ethical and Psychological Aspects," Swiss Medical Weekly, 138, 523-528. WEIZSÄCKER, C. C. V. (1985): "Zeit Und Geld. Tertium Non Datur," Bern. FOR655 – Nr. 01 / 2007 11 Working Paper Series FOR 655 1. Hartmut Kliemt: Priority setting in the age of genomics, December 2007 (1) 2. Marlies Ahlert: If not only numbers count – allocation of equal chances, December 2007 (2) 3. Stefan Felder: The variance of length of stay and the optimal DRG outlier payments, December 2007 (3) 4. Jeannette Winkelhage, Adele Diederich, Simone Heil, Petra Lietz, Felix Schmitz-Justen, Margrit Schreier: Qualitative Stakeholder-Interviews: Entwicklung eines Interviewleitfadens zur Erfassung von Prioritäten in der medizinischen Versorgung, December 2007 (4)