Defined at a high level of abstraction, rationing is inevitable in medicine. Not everything that might be in a patient's best interest can be done in a world of finite resources, and some constraint has to limit his treatment. Thus the left-wing jibe that the market features "rationing by price."But there are many good reasons to prefer rationing by price to other forms of rationing, which is why we use it for most products and services. Those reasons are not limited to efficiency, though they include it. The rationing involved in a free market is decentralized, creating more room than a bureaucratic system for people to make different trade-offs. Hence most people do not think of it as rationing at all.