 What are the principal ethical concerns involved in how we allocate scarce medical resources to people who can benefit from them? Health care resources (broadly construed to include treatments or interventions, medications, medical and rehabilitative devices, health care services and service providers, health care systems, clinics and other settings, and so on) are by their nature scarce resources. They are scarce both as a consequence of societal, macro-allocative decisions about how much social resources are put into health care (rather than, say, into education, scientific research or fighting foreign wars), and because some of these resources, such as transplantable organs, are intrinsically scarce. 