Word: rationalize
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...problem: many natural attractions are experiencing "greenlock." Not only are popular parks from Acadia in Maine to Yosemite in California jammed with visitors, but the overcrowding is spreading to state parks, national forests and rivers, raising environmental concerns and threatening the wilderness "experience." Everywhere, authorities are having to ration the outdoors with lotteries, permits and reservations for everything from biking to hiking. "It's ironic," observes University of California historian Roderick Nash. "By making wilderness popular, we now have to save it from its friends...
Another, perhaps inevitable, answer is to ration health care more scrupulously. Already many hospital administrators are arguing that less money should be spent on highly specialized care -- patients with terminal conditions, babies born with multiple defects who are not expected to live long, elderly patients in need of organ transplants. "We have to let some babies die, some old people die," says Dr. John West, a trauma-care expert at the University of California at Irvine. "We have to look at the quality of life, and we have to look at the return on our health-care buck. You just...
Purely economic arguments for euthanasia can sound brutally calculating. But as health-care costs rise annually at double and triple the rate of inflation, and as new technologies promise ever higher bills for ever older patients, the questions grow about how to ration medical care. In 1987 the Oregon legislature voted to deny organ transplants under its Medicaid program and to use that money instead for prenatal care. It is only a matter of time before the issue of continuing care for patients in a vegetative state comes under similar scrutiny...
Rumania is potentially a prosperous country, but Ceausescu's compulsion to pay off a $10 billion foreign debt led him to sell most of the country's oil and food production abroad and ration everything at home. Last week supplies his regime had hoarded for export -- and for the old communist elite -- were rushed into empty stores, and shoppers were dazzled to find meat, oranges, coffee and chocolate, the kind of goods that had not been available to them for years...
...Denied a ration book by the state after the broadcast, Tokes was unable to buy bread, meat or fuel. Parishioners who tried to bring him provisions were confronted by police. The pastor was barred from meeting relatives, and his telephone was shut off. In a surreal form of harassment, authorities occasionally turned on the phone to deliver threats to Tokes, then billed him for the calls at long-distance rates. To protect his four-year-old son, Tokes sent the boy to live with relatives...