Word: rational
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...House in May rejected the President's stand-by rationing plan, but it offers some clues to any future program. Car owners would get ration coupons and could sell unused coupons on a "white market" at any price; each car would be allotted about 50 gal. a month, though the totals would vary by state; no more than three cars in each household could receive coupons; extra rations would be given to police cars, ambulances, taxis, farm tractors; heavy recreational vehicles would get nothing...
Probably a more efficient measure would be to "ration by price," that is, to free the market and remove gasoline price controls. President Carter has the authority to do that, subject to congressional veto. Decontrol would cause a political storm because prices would immediately rise. Some experts warn that gasoline would soar to $2 a gal., but free market advocates argue that long-term prices would go up much less, by perhaps a few cents or a dime a gal. In any case, three facts are most significant. First, a free market unquestionably would reduce demand by raising the cost...
Senator Kennedy's health insurance plan would provide coverage for all Americans and aim at limiting costs, an admirable scheme. But along with any plan to ration medical care and limit its cost comes a compromise in quality. Will the Senator tell us this...
...people's mood and the politician's watchful calculation of it. The two intersect in Congress, which seems to be dissolving into dreary incoherence. Congress, with its delicate Geiger counters of mood all activated and ticking gently, refused even to grant the Administration stand-by authority to ration gas-although it is true that Carter's approach on that subject was notably clumsy...
More fundamentally still, the system of third-party payments may be the root of much medical inflation, but the old-fashioned alternative is a kind of rationing of medical care by ability to pay that the nation now would rightly find abhorrent. Says Rashi Fein, a noted Harvard medical economist: "Medicine is a social product like education. To ration health in terms of price is not the hallmark of a civilized society. You can differentiate between rich and poor with Cadillacs and yachts, but not with medicine...