An ideal entry point into health economics for everyone from aspiring economists to healthcare professionals.
The economics of healthcare are messy. For most consumers, there’s little control over costs or services. Sometimes doctors are paid a lot; other times they aren’t paid at all. Insurance and drug companies are evil, except when they’re not. If economics is the study of market efficiency, how do we make sense of this?
Better Health Economics is a warts-and-all introduction to a field that is more exceptions than rules. Economists Tal Gross and Matthew J. Notowidigdo offer readers an accessible primer on the field’s essential concepts, a review of the latest research, and a framework for thinking about this increasingly imperfect market.
A love letter to a traditionally unlovable topic, Better Health Economics provides an ideal entry point for students in social science, business, public policy, and healthcare. It’s a reminder that healthcare may be a failed market—but it’s our failed market.
The Japanese health care system provides universal coverage to a healthy but aging population. Its costs are among the lowest in the world and have remained nearly constant as a share of the economy for more than a decade. Americans concerned about runaway medical spending need to know about the successes that Japan has experienced and the problems the country has encountered in its effort to control costs while maintaining quality of care.
Offered here is an analysis of the key issues of cost-containment by specialists followed by reactions from some of America's best-known experts on health care delivery and finance. Topics include the macro-and microeconomics of health care, technology and costs, institutions and costs, attitudinal and behavioral aspects, and the politics of health care.
This collection provides an authoritative study of successful cost-containment in the Japanese health care system---a chronicle of success that is neither a statistical illusion nor a result of sociocultural factors. Detailed here is information on the key mechanism of cost constraint: a fee schedule that covers virtually all medical services and rewards inexpensive services while making expensive services unprofitable. This system has resulted in the provision of quality health care to the entire population at roughly half the cost of American health care. Is it a single-payer system? Would the United States have to introduce a dramatically altered health care structure to benefit from the Japanese experience? No. Japan relies mainly on fee-for-service medicine financed by multiple insurers---a system familiar to Americans and one from which many lessons may be learned.
Based on conferences held in Washington, D.C., and Izu, Japan, this volume collects original chapters on the overall cost structure, how the negotiated mandatory fee schedule works, specific mechanisms for cost control, the politics of health care financing, and the impact of cost cutting on quality, among other topics. These pathbreaking studies will be a significant resource for policymakers and scholars interested in comparative health care systems as well as those interested in health care reform in the United States.
The next two decades will mark a new phase in the demographic transition of the United States as baby boomers become eligible for Social Security and Medicare. Drawing on evidence from the United States and other nations, Explorations in the Economics of Aging yields important new findings on how economic decisions by households and policy choices by governments will influence the effects of this demographic shift. It explores topics such as the implications of differential mortality rates by income on Social Security, the link between cognition and economic outcomes, and scale variations in self-reported work disability. This volume will be an important reference for economists and policymakers alike.
A sharp exposé of the roots of the cost-exposure consensus in American health care that shows how the next wave of reform can secure real access and efficiency.
The toxic battle over how to reshape American health care has overshadowed the underlying bipartisan agreement that health insurance coverage should be incomplete. Both Democrats and Republicans expect patients to bear a substantial portion of health care costs through deductibles, copayments, and coinsurance. In theory this strategy empowers patients to make cost-benefit tradeoffs, encourages thrift and efficiency in a system rife with waste, and defends against the moral hazard that can arise from insurance. But in fact, as Christopher T. Robertson reveals, this cost-exposure consensus keeps people from valuable care, causes widespread anxiety, and drives many patients and their families into bankruptcy and foreclosure.
Marshalling a decade of research, Exposed offers an alternative framework that takes us back to the core purpose of insurance: pooling resources to provide individuals access to care that would otherwise be unaffordable. Robertson shows how the cost-exposure consensus has changed the meaning and experience of health care and exchanged one form of moral hazard for another. He also provides avenues of reform. If cost exposure remains a primary strategy, physicians, hospitals, and other providers must be held legally responsible for communicating those costs to patients, and insurance companies should scale cost exposure to individuals’ ability to pay.
New and more promising models are on the horizon, if only we would let go our misguided embrace of incomplete insurance.
In this concise, straightforward analysis, Jost challenges the historical and theoretical assumptions on which the consumer-driven health care movement is based and reexamines the empirical evidence that it claims as support. He traces the histories of both private health insurance in the United States and the CDHC movement. The idea animating the drive for consumer-driven health care is that the fundamental problem with the American health care system is what economists call “moral hazard,” the risk that consumers overuse services for which they do not bear the cost. Jost reveals moral hazard as an inadequate explanation of the complex problems plaguing the American health care system, and he points to troubling legal and ethical issues raised by CDHC. He describes how other countries have achieved universal access to high-quality health care at lower cost, without relying extensively on cost sharing, and he concludes with a proposal for how the United States might do the same, incorporating aspects of CDHC while recognizing its limitations.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press