Peter A Ubel, Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 2000, 208 pages, £15.50.

Pricing Life is an extremely timely and stimulating book. The debate about health care rationing has now been running for several decades but there are still people who publicly deny that rationing of health care has to take place, or that health care rationing could be ethically justifiable. In many countries we have also had politicians who have refused to allow the “R” word to pass their lips. In this well written, and very direct book Peter Ubel decisively shows that rationing is an inevitable feature of modern medicine and that it is not something that health care administrators and economists force doctors to perform against …