Efficient, Fair, and Incentive-Compatible Healthcare Rationing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new healthcare rationing method that ensures fairness, efficiency, and incentive compatibility, allowing optimal allocation of medical units respecting priorities and eligibility without encouraging misrepresentation.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel allocation rule for healthcare resources that guarantees fairness, efficiency, and incentive compatibility, and characterizes all such feasible allocations.

Findings

The allocation rule respects patient priorities and eligibility.

It maximizes the number of allocated units.

The rule is polynomial-time computable.

Abstract

Rationing of healthcare resources has emerged as an important issue, which has been discussed by medical experts, policy-makers, and the general public. We consider a rationing problem where medical units are to be allocated to patients. Each unit is reserved for one of several categories and each category has a priority ranking of the patients. We present an allocation rule that respects the priorities, complies with the eligibility requirements, allocates the largest feasible number of units, and does not incentivize agents to hide that they qualify through a category. The rule characterizes all possible allocations that satisfy the first three properties and is polynomial-time computable.