The appropriate limits placed upon what people can expect from health care

In ‘Speaking Truth to Power’, the American political scientist Aaron Wildavsky argued that the ‘pathology’ of healthcare policy is that the past successes of medicine are likely to lead to future failures in healthcare policy. For, as life expectancy increases, only partly as the result of medicine, a nation’s healthcare system is faced with an older population whose ailments are more difficult to treat, sending the costs of treatment ever higher while each improvement in health and medicine becomes more expensive than the last. It is the ‘doing better – feeling worse’ syndrome which, in the end, Wildavsky argued, will also undermine solidarity, since: ‘the rich don’t like waiting, the poor don’t like high prices, and those in the middle tend to complain about both.