Word: rationalization
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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...
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...
Congress completed the debacle by yielding to parochial interests and finally shrinking fearfully from anything that might restrict driving. The Senate did approve stand-by rationing, 59 to 38, but only after forcing several concessions. The most important would have allotted ration coupons on the basis not of car ownership but of past gasoline consumption, thereby funneling more to Western and rural states. Besides, the Senate passed a resolution that the plan should go into effect only if gasoline supplies fell 20% below demand, a greater gap than anyone presently expects...