OBJECTIVES: Increased competition in the health sector has led hospitals and other care institutions to explore new allocation mechanisms that move away from traditional expert based care allocation to more commercially based allocation mechanisms. Little is known however about consumer perceptions and evaluations of new commercial (price based) allocation mechanisms and how these perceptions and evaluations may differ between individuals and treatments. This paper investigates how consumers evaluate (new) hospital care allocation mechanisms. METHODS: We used data of 577 respondents from an American consumer panel. To test the framework confirmatory factor analysis was done and random parameter regression models were estimated. RESULTS: We found that offering individuals the opportunity to pay more for a higher chance of treatment (flexible pricing) affects their perceptions of both the total (p<0.005) and distributional health outcomes (p<0.001) of a hospital's care, which in turn affect consumer attitude towards the allocation mechanism (p<0.001  and p<0.001). Furthermore, we found that the effects of these two key collective outcome perceptions on consumer attitude are moderated by the type of medical condition (life saving vs. life improving) (p<0.001 and p<0.003), by age (p<0.002 and p<0.001), and to a lesser extent by gender (p<0.01 and n.s.). CONCLUSIONS: Knowing how consumers evaluate allocation mechanisms is important for hospitals because less acceptable allocation mechanisms may scare away patients and decrease community support towards the hospital. Therefore our findings can be relevant and helpful for hospitals that consider implementing new allocation policies.