Two disputes are waged simultaneously in the pages of this issue of the Report, but it might be easy to lose track of the second. The obvious dispute is about resource allocation in health policy: the question is whether limited health care resources should be spent on identified victims-people whose struggles with disease have made the news-when the same investment might provide more help if spent on a larger number of unknown, merely "statistical" people. This dispute is a deep part of the history of bioethics. Roughly fifty years ago, a story in Life Magazine about how dialysis was rationed out to people with end-stage renal disease generated an uproar that helped bring bioethics into existence as a field and contributed to passage of a federal law that to this day provides many people with free dialysis.
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