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...

Health services in the Republic of South Africa (RSA) are provided by a mixture of public and private providers and institutions. Estimates of total health-related expenditure for 1985 range between 5.3% and 5.9% of gross national product (GNP), divided on approximately a 55:45 basis between...