Waiting times for elective surgery, like hip replacement, are often referred to as an equitable rationing mechanism in publicly-funded healthcare systems because access to care is not based on socioeconomic status. Previous work has established that that this may not be the case and there is...

The English National Health Service (NHS) was established in 1948, and has therefore yielded some long time series data on health system performance. Waiting time for inpatient care have been a persistent policy concern since the creation of the NHS. After developing a simple theoretical...