One the primary goals of any - and indeed every - medical system is to ration resources. Which is to say to privilege access to medicine. When we talk about medical care access, we tend to talk around this, but it's a needed part of any system. Any system that doesn't do this quickly learns, institutionally, that without some limiting mechanisms in place the system will be overwhelmed and its resources exhausted.

Obviously some approaches and systems work better than others and are more tolerant to some kinds of faults. Unfortunately, none of this gets away from the absurd, insulting, and grotesque reality that care has to rationed somehow.