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The aim of this study is to describe the view of age‐related prioritisation in health care among physicians and healthcare politicians and to compare their views regarding gender and age.

Swedish physicians (n=390) and politicians (n=310), mean age 52 years, answered an electronic questionnaire concerning age‐related priority setting in healthcare. The questionnaire had fixed response alternatives with possibility of adding comments.

A majority of the participants thought that age should not influence prioritisation, although more physicians than politicians thought that younger patients should be prioritised. There were also significant differences concerning their views on lifestyle‐related diseases and on who should make decisions concerning both vertical and horizontal prioritisation. The comments indicated that the politicians referred to ethical principles as a basis for their standpoints while the physicians often referred to the importance of biological rather than chronological age.

Web‐based surveys as a method has its limitations as biased samples and biased returns could cause major problems, such as limited control over the drop‐outs. The sample in this study was, however, judged to be representative.

The results indicate that supplementary guiding principles concerning prioritisation in healthcare are needed in order to facilitate decision‐making concerning resource allocation on a local level.

This paper adds important knowledge about decision makers' views on age‐related priorities in healthcare, thus contributing to scientific base for prioritisation in healthcare and the ongoing debate in society.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and describe main obstacles for politicians when dealing with healthcare priority setting.

The study had an exploratory descriptive design based on interviews with 18 politicians from two different county councils in Sweden. The interviews were analyzed using inductive qualitative content analysis.

The politicians highlighted the importance of, and difficulties in, communicate political missions; the politicians in this study saw the media as not always being fair watchdogs, implying that possibly important but unpopular prioritizing decisions were not made because of the risks of being badly reported and therefore not re-elected. Breaking up established structures in care practice is difficult and change takes time, partly because of existing higher level financing and rules and the system’s traditional separation of facilities and services. Although the politicians highlighted their limited power to influence and control resource allocation they could give small and “lower profile”, low-prioritized disciplines control of their own budgets and base payments on the results the disciplines accomplished.

This study highlights the difficulties that politicians experience, for example, having to take unpleasant decisions and thereby run the risk of being scrutinized by media, which in turn could influence how effectively tax money is being used.