This paper critiques 'needs assessment' as a basis for allocating public funding of health and disability services and discusses an alternative economics-based approach. In essence, the former approach ignores the effects on health outcomes of health care spending at the margin while the latter...

We describe a new process for creating points systems for prioritising patients for elective health services. Beginning in 2004, the authors were closely involved in a project to develop the process, initially for coronary artery bypass graft surgery and then successively for other elective...