The MGH Trustees Say No to Heart Transplants

On February 1 of this year the trusters of the Massachusetts General Hospital, after months of deliberation, announced that they had decided against allowing the hospital's cardiac surgical service to begin a limited program of heart transplantation. This decision, which made headlines all over the country, is likely to be quoted and debated for a long time to come. It raises important issues about the allocation of scarce and costly health-care resources in this country. In Great Britain the National Health Service has recently lifted an embargo on payments for heart transplantations that it had imposed in 1973