Queues for in-patient surgery are commonplace in universal health care systems. Clinicians and hospitals usually manage these waiting lists with informal criteria for determining patient priority--a form of implicit rationing. To understand the workings of implicit rationing by queue, we took...

Many discussions of managed care, as well as policy making and research efforts, treat managed care with a broad brush, forcing a wide variety of organizations into a single framework that facilitates discussion but abstracts from a number of key issues. Although it may be instructive to conduct...