Traumatic Brain Injury and Resource Allocation

Abstract

Globally, there is inequitable access to healthcare. Despite efforts to promote universal access to healthcare, the political and economic conditions that give rise to this are unlikely to be resolved. While a minority of wealthy countries enjoy unlimited privately purchased healthcare, for most, there are limits to what can be accessed. In the few successful high-income, public healthcare systems, limited rationing results mostly in treatment delays or restriction of novel expensive treatments. For the majority of people globally though, there are severe restrictions, and some form of rationing is not so much by design as by default. Given these different levels of healthcare, even defining universal approaches to rationing becomes difficult. While efforts should be made to narrow the wealth gap, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted that all populations are vulnerable and that rapidly overwhelming disease pandemics can threaten even the wealthiest of countries.