In this paper we model and evaluate power ramping as a mechanism for achieving explicit access priority among traffic classes in LTE/LTE-A, taking into account preamble SINR considerations, preamble collisions, capture effect, and Physical Downlink Control Channel (PDCCH) deficiency. The results show that explicit power ramping can provide reasonable performance differentiation among traffic classes but it still cannot overcome coupling among traffic classes which exists due to preamble collisions and insufficient PDCCH resources.