Healthcare rationing is coming, with a vengeance. If you value your health, you'd better understand it--and be ready. In this book, one of the world's leading healthcare economists offers a hard-nosed analysis of today's soaring healthcare costs--and shows how it will feel to be at the mercy of a system that might choose not to cure you. Dranove previews the transition from today's ad hoc rationing to an era of "rational rationing," in which economic analysis of the value of human lives and specific treatments is both explicit and routine. He assesses the mixed results of rational rationing in Great Britain and Australia, where government decision-makers struggle with balancing science and politics, in the face of budgets that place a shockingly low value on life. You'll discover healthcare economists have learned to numerically score different diseases to determine which are most worth curing; even how to calculate the value of your own life in tomorrow's healthcare system. Finally, Dranove compares the track record of government-sponsored and market-based rationing, concluding that if rationing must come, it's best left to the market, where individuals can decide for themselves what their lives are worth.