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.

There is little debate that health care in the United States is in need of reform. But where should those improvements begin? With insurers? Drug makers? The doctors themselves? In Big Med, David Dranove and Lawton Robert Burns argue that we’re overlooking the most ubiquitous cause of our costly and underperforming system: megaproviders, the expansive health care organizations that have become the face of American medicine. Your local hospital is likely part of one. Your doctors, too. And the megaproviders are bad news for your health and your wallet.

Drawing on decades of combined expertise in health care consolidation, Dranove and Burns trace Big Med’s emergence in the 1990s, followed by its swift rise amid false promises of scale economies and organizational collaboration. In the decades since, megaproviders have gobbled up market share and turned independent physicians into salaried employees of big bureaucracies, while delivering on none of their early promises. For patients this means higher costs and lesser care. Meanwhile, physicians report increasingly low morale, making it all but impossible for most systems to implement meaningful reforms.

In Big Med, Dranove and Burns combine their respective skills in economics and management to provide a nuanced explanation of how the provision of health care has been corrupted and submerged under consolidation. They offer practical recommendations for improving competition policies that would reform megaproviders to actually achieve the efficiencies and quality improvements they have long promised.
This is an essential read for understanding the current state of the health care system in America—and the steps urgently needed to create an environment of better care for all of us.

Since the 1970s health care costs in the United States have doubled, insurance premiums have far outpaced inflation, and the numbers of the uninsured and underinsured are increasing at an alarming rate. At the same time the public expects better health care and access to the latest treatment technologies. Governments, desperate to contain ballooning costs, often see a market-based approach to health care as the solution; critics of market systems argue that government regulation is necessary to secure accessible care for all.

The Catholic Church generally questions the market's ability to satisfy the many human needs intrinsic to any care delivery system yet, although the Church views health care as a basic human right, it has yet to offer strategies for how such a right can be guaranteed. Mary J. McDonough, a former Legal Aid lawyer for medical cases, understands the advantages and disadvantages of market-based care and offers insight and solutions in Can a Health Care Market Be Moral?

Drawing on Catholic social teachings from St. Augustine to Pope John Paul II, McDonough reviews health system successes and failures from around the world and assesses market approaches to health care as proposed by leading economists such as Milton Friedman, Regina Herzlinger, Mark Pauly, and Alain Enthoven. Balancing aspects of these proposals with Daniel Callahan's value-dimension approach, McDonough offers a Catholic vision of health care in the United States that allows for some market mechanisms while promoting justice and concern for the least advantaged.

How global health practices can end up reorganizing practices of care for the people and communities they seek to serve 

Commodities of Care examines the unanticipated effects of global health interventions, ideas, and practices as they unfold in communities of men who have sex with men (MSM) in China. Targeted for the scaling-up of HIV testing, Elsa L. Fan examines how the impact of this initiative has transformed these men from subjects of care into commodities of care: through the use of performance-based financing tied to HIV testing, MSM have become a source of economic and political capital. 

In ethnographic detail, Fan shows how this particular program, ushered in by global health donors, became the prevailing strategy to control the epidemic in China in the late 2000s. Fan examines the implementation of MSM testing and its effects among these men, arguing that the intervention produced new markets of men, driven by the push to meet testing metrics. 

Fan shows how men who have sex with men in China came to see themselves as part of a global “MSM” category, adopting new selfhoods and socialities inextricably tied to HIV and to testing. Wider trends in global health programming have shaped national public health responses in China and, this book reveals, have radically altered the ways health, disease, and care are addressed. 

The slow violence being inflicted on our environment—through everything from carbon emissions to plastic pollution—also represents an impending public health catastrophe. Yet standard health care practices are more concerned with short-term outcomes than long-term sustainability. Every resource used to deliver medical care, from IV tubes to antibiotics to electricity, has a significant environmental impact. This raises an urgent ethical dilemma: in striving to improve the health outcomes of individual patients, are we damaging human health on a global scale?
 
In Dying Green, award-winning educator Christine Vatovec offers an engaging study that asks us to consider the broader environmental sustainability of health care. Through a comparative analysis of the care provided to terminally ill patients in a conventional cancer ward, a palliative care unit, and an acute-care hospice facility, she shows how decisions made at a patient’s bedside govern the environmental footprint of the healthcare industry. Likewise, Dying Green offers insights on the many opportunities that exist for reducing the ecological impacts of medical practices in general, while also enhancing care for the dying in particular. By envisioning a more sustainable approach to care, this book offers a way forward that is better for both patients and the planet.

A timely investigation of the potential economic effects, both realized and unrealized, of artificial intelligence within the United States healthcare system.

In sweeping conversations about the impact of artificial intelligence on many sectors of the economy, healthcare has received relatively little attention. Yet it seems unlikely that an industry that represents nearly one-fifth of the economy could escape the efficiency and cost-driven disruptions of AI.

The Economics of Artificial Intelligence: Health Care Challenges brings together contributions from health economists, physicians, philosophers, and scholars in law, public health, and machine learning to identify the primary barriers to entry of AI in the healthcare sector. Across original papers and in wide-ranging responses, the contributors analyze barriers of four types: incentives, management, data availability, and regulation. They also suggest that AI has the potential to improve outcomes and lower costs. Understanding both the benefits of and barriers to AI adoption is essential for designing policies that will affect the evolution of the healthcare system.

In The Product of Medicine, Caitjan Gainty traces the history of the early twentieth-century medical efficiency movement in the United States, restoring it as a significant driver of medicine’s modernization while also revealing its broader significance as a cultural force shaping modern American life. Covering a range of  efficiency’s uses in medicine—from the assembly-line structure of the early Mayo Clinic and Henry Ford Hospital to the landmark Flexner Report and the prosecution of the American Medical Association as a monopoly—Gainty challenges long-standing presumptions about how medicine acquired power and prestige during the Progressive Era. Gainty demonstrates how, rather than as a result of pathbreaking scientific advance or the rise of professional organizations, medicine came to be understood as modern through the more prosaic processes of standardization and organization. In doing so, Gainty uncovers medical efficiency as not only a function of industrial capitalism but also a vehicle for balancing populist and autocratic tendencies to maintain a workable American democracy.

Examining the health care market in a historical framework, Drake analyzes the forces and events that have shaped American health care in the twentieth century and sheds new light on why and how our health care system has dampened competitive market forces and failed to provide sound value for much of our health care expenditures. He examines the roles that physicians, hospitals, insurance companies, businesses, individual consumers, and government legislation have played in creating a provider-dominated market in which the cost of care has been concealed from consumers. Comparing U.S. health care expenditures with those of other developed countries, he concludes that a significant part of our health care problem is the style of medicine practiced in the United States, which is much more specialized and high tech than in other developed nations.

Drake develops proposals for health care financing reform that consider the political and economic difficulties involved. He first examines the Clinton health care reform plan and makes specific recommendations for revisions that would improve its likelihood of controlling costs. He then offers an alternative proposal that would both maintain the principle of universal, noncancelable coverage and eliminate the flaws in the market for health care services by giving consumers a financial stake in cost containment.

This timely argument, combining economic and historical analysis with thoughtful consideration of the motivating humanitarian and political concerns, will be of interest to everyone seeking to understand and to reform our ailing health care system.

Neoliberals often point to improvements in public health and nutrition as examples of globalisation's success, but this book argues that the corporate food and medicine industries are destroying environments and ruining living conditions across the world.

Scientist Stan Cox expertly draws out the strong link between Western big business and environmental destruction. This is a shocking account of the huge damage that drug manufacturers and large food corporations are inflicting on the health of people and crops worldwide. Companies discussed include Wal-Mart, GlaxoSmithKline, Tyson Foods and Monsanto. On issues ranging from the poisoning of water supplies in South Asia to natural gas depletion and how it threatens global food supplies, Cox shows how the demand for profits is always put above the public interest.

While individual efforts to "shop for a better world" and conserve energy are laudable, Cox explains that they need to be accompanied by an economic system that is grounded in ecological sustainability if we are to find a cure for our Sick Planet.

To Live and Die in America details how the United States has among the worst indicators of health in the industrialised world and at the same time spends significantly more on its health care system than any other industrial nation.

Robert Chernomas and Ian Hudson explain this contradictory phenomenon as the product of the unique brand of capitalism that has developed in the US. It is this particular form of capitalism that created both the social and economic conditions that largely influence health outcomes and the inefficient, unpopular and inaccessible health care system that is incapable of dealing with them.

The authors argue that improving health in America requires a change in the conditions in which people live and work as well as a restructured health care system.

A provocative call to rethink America's values in health care.