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19 books match the query 'Medical economics'

cover of Better Health Economics: An Introduction for Everyone

Better Health Economics

An Introduction for Everyone

Tal Gross and Matthew J. Notowidigdo

University of Chicago Press, 2024

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.

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cover of Big Med: Megaproviders and the High Cost of Health Care in America

Big Med

Megaproviders and the High Cost of Health Care in America

David Dranove and Lawton Robert Burns

University of Chicago Press, 2021

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.
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cover of Commodities of Care: The Business of HIV Testing in China

Commodities of Care

The Business of HIV Testing in China

Elsa L. Fan

University of Minnesota Press, 2021

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. 

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cover of Competition in the Health Care Sector: Ten Years Later

Competition in the Health Care Sector

Ten Years Later

Warren Greenberg, ed.

Duke University Press, 1988

“Competition. Deregulation. Free market forces. The debate over competition in health care that raged in the 1970s brought with it a new economic jargon, a vocabulary of concepts and issues unheard of in hospitals a decade earlier.
“Competition in health care has developed to a greater degree than most economists predicted ten years ago. That is the conclusion of Warren Greenberg in his introduction to Competition in the Health Care Sector: Ten Years Later, a retrospective of a 1977 Federal Trade Commission conference, which produced the landmark treatise Competition in the Health Care Sector: Past, Present, and Future. Seven of the ten original papers are reexamined; a chapter on the nursing home industry has been added.
“As with the original volume, Greenberg predicts that the retrospective will become a critical element in the health care economic literature.”—Hospitals
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cover of Doctors and Their Workshops: Economic Models of Physician Behavior

Doctors and Their Workshops

Economic Models of Physician Behavior

Mark V. Pauly

University of Chicago Press, 1980

Doctors are obviously influential in determining the costs of their services. But even more important, many believe, is the influence physicians have over the use and cost of nonphysician health-care resources and services. Doctors and Their Workshops is the first comprehensive attempt to use economic analysis to understand some of the physician effects on nonphysician aspects of health care.

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cover of Doctors and the State: The Politics of Health Care in France and the United States

Doctors and the State

The Politics of Health Care in France and the United States

David Wilsford

Duke University Press, 1991

All advanced health care systems face severe difficulties in financing the delivery of today’s sophisticated medical care. In this study David Wilsford compares the health systems in France and the United States to demonstrate that some political systems are considerably more effective at controlling the cost of care than others. He argues that two variables—the autonomy of the state and the strength and cohesiveness of organized medicine—explain this variance.
In France, Wilsford shows, the state is strong in the health policy domain, while organized medicine is weak and divided. Consequently, physicians exercise little influence over health care policymaking. By contrast, in the United States the state is weak, the employers and insurers who pay for health care are fragmented, and organized medicine is strong and well financed. As a result, medical professionals are able to exert a greater influence on policymaking, thus making cost control more difficult.
Wilsford extends his comparison to health care systems in the United Kingdom, West Germany, Italy, Canada, and Japan. Whether the private or public sector finances health care, he discovers, there is now an important trend in all of the advanced industrial countries toward controlling escalating costs by curbing both the medical profession’s clinical autonomy and physicians’ incomes.
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cover of Dying Green: A Journey through End-of-Life Medicine in Search of Sustainable Health Care

Dying Green

A Journey through End-of-Life Medicine in Search of Sustainable Health Care

Christine Vatovec

Rutgers University Press, 2023

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.
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cover of Economic Aspects of Health

Economic Aspects of Health

Edited by Victor R. Fuchs

University of Chicago Press, 1982

Unlike earlier work in medical economics, which has focused on medical care, these ten papers stress the production and consequences of health itself. They reveal a serious concern with real-world health problems in their investigation of such subjects as infant mortality, life expectancy, morbidity, and disability. These papers are unusual, as well, in bringing to bear on these problems new and powerful theoretical and statistical tools. They draw on, and in some cases are, original sources for new bodies of data. As such, Economic Aspects of Health comprises a useful blend of relevance and rigor.
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cover of Health and Labor Force Participation over the Life Cycle: Evidence from the Past

Health and Labor Force Participation over the Life Cycle

Evidence from the Past

Edited by Dora L. Costa

University of Chicago Press, 2003

The twentieth century saw significant increases in both life expectancy and retirement rates-changes that have had dramatic impacts on nearly every aspect of society and the economy. Forecasting future trends in health and retirement rates, as we must do now, requires investigation of such long-term trends and their causes.

To that end, this book draws on new data-an extensive longitudinal survey of Union Army veterans born between 1820 and 1850-to examine the factors that affected health and labor force participation in nineteenth-century America. Contributors consider the impacts of a variety of conditions-including social class, wealth, occupation, family, and community-on the morbidity and mortality of the group. The papers investigate and address a number of special topics, including the influence of previous exposure to infectious disease, migration, and community factors such as lead in water mains. They also analyze the roles of income, health, and social class in retirement decisions, paying particular attention to the social context of disability.

Economists and historians who specialize in demography or labor, as well as those who study public health, will welcome the unique contributions offered by this book, which offers a clearer view than ever before of the workings and complexities of life, death, and labor during the nineteenth century.
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cover of Inquiries in the Economics of Aging

Inquiries in the Economics of Aging

Edited by David A. Wise

University of Chicago Press, 1998

For over a decade, the National Bureau of Economic Research has sponsored the Economics of Aging Program, under the direction of David A. Wise. The program addresses issues that affect the well-being of individuals as they age and a society that is composed increasingly of older people.

Within the next twenty years, an unprecedented proportion of Americans will be over sixty-five. New research in the economics of aging is an essential element of understanding what the future holds for this aging population. Inquiries in the Economics of Aging presents both empirical papers that consider questions that are fundamental to public policy and more theoretical contributions that lay new groundwork for future research in the economics of aging.

Inquiries in the Economics of Aging provides a timely overview of some of the most important questions facing researchers on aging and outlines new techniques and models that may help to answer these questions. This important volume will be of great interest to specialists and policy makers as it paves the way for future analysis.

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cover of Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine

Sick Planet

Corporate Food and Medicine

Stan Cox

Pluto Press, 2008

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.

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cover of The Economics of Artificial Intelligence: Health Care Challenges

The Economics of Artificial Intelligence

Health Care Challenges

Edited by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb, and Catherine E. Tucker

University of Chicago Press, 2024

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.

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cover of The Medical Delivery Business: Health Reform, Childbirth, and the Economic Order

The Medical Delivery Business

Health Reform, Childbirth, and the Economic Order

Perkins, Barbara Bridgman

Rutgers University Press, 2004

 

Americans at the end of the twentieth century worried that managed care had fundamentally transformed the character of medicine. In The Medical Delivery Business, Barbara Bridgman Perkins uses examples drawn from maternal and infant care to argue that the business approach in medicine is not a new development. Health care reformers throughout the century looked to industrial, corporate, and commercial enterprises as models for the institutions, specialties, and technological strategies that defined modern medicine.

In the case of perinatal care, the business model emphasized specialized over primary care, encouraged the use of surgical and technological procedures, and unnecessarily turned childbirth into an intensive care situation. Active management techniques, for example, encouraged obstetricians to accelerate labor with oxytocin to augment their productivity. Despite the achievements of the childbirth and women’s health movement in the 1970s, aggressive medical intervention has remained the birth experience for millions of American women (and their babies) every year.

The Medical Delivery Business challenges the conventional view that a dose of the market is good for medicine. While Perkins is sympathetic to the goals of progressive and feminist reformers, she questions whether their strategies will succeed in making medicine more equitable and effective. She argues that the medical care system itself needs to be fundamentally "re-formed," and the reforms must be based on democracy, caring, and social justice as well as economics.

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cover of The Political Economy of Health in Africa: Mis Af#60

The Political Economy of Health in Africa

Mis Af#60

Toyin Falola

Ohio University Press, 1992

This book examines the major phases in the history of health services in Africa and treats health as an integral aspect of the deepening crisis in Africa’s underdevelopment. One important thesis is that Western delivery systems have made health care less accessible for most people. Contributors direct attention to problems engendered by food shortages, acute cases of infection, the market in fake drugs as well as the inequality of access to facilities, the violation of human rights, and the recent danger of the dumping of toxic wastes in several African countries. One major implication of this volume is that there can be no solution to the health crisis in Africa until the linkage between health and poverty is recognized. The authors consider questions that add to the contemporary discussion of the place that traditional African medicine and philosophy should take alongside modern Western medicine in Africa today.
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cover of The Product of Medicine: How Efficiency Made American Health Care

The Product of Medicine

How Efficiency Made American Health Care

Caitjan Gainty

Duke University Press, 2025

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.
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cover of To Live and Die in America: Class, Power, Health and Healthcare

To Live and Die in America

Class, Power, Health and Healthcare

Robert Chernomas and Ian Hudson

Pluto Press, 2013

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.

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cover of Uncertain Times: Kenneth Arrow and the Changing Economics of Health Care

Uncertain Times

Kenneth Arrow and the Changing Economics of Health Care

Peter J. Hammer, Deborah Haas-Wilson, Mark A. Peterson, and William M. Sage, eds.

Duke University Press, 2003

This volume revisits the Nobel Prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow’s classic 1963 essay “Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care” in light of the many changes in American health care since its publication. Arrow’s groundbreaking piece, reprinted in full here, argued that while medicine was subject to the same models of competition and profit maximization as other industries, concepts of trust and morals also played key roles in understanding medicine as an economic institution and in balancing the asymmetrical relationship between medical providers and their patients. His conclusions about the medical profession’s failures to “insure against uncertainties” helped initiate the reevaluation of insurance as a public and private good.

Coming from diverse backgrounds—economics, law, political science, and the health care industry itself—the contributors use Arrow’s article to address a range of present-day health-policy questions. They examine everything from health insurance and technological innovation to the roles of charity, nonprofit institutions, and self-regulation in addressing medical needs. The collection concludes with a new essay by Arrow, in which he reflects on the health care markets of the new millennium. At a time when medical costs continue to rise, the ranks of the uninsured grow, and uncertainty reigns even among those with health insurance, this volume looks back at a seminal work of scholarship to provide critical guidance for the years ahead.

Contributors
Linda H. Aiken
Kenneth J. Arrow
Gloria J. Bazzoli
M. Gregg Bloche
Lawrence Casalino
Michael Chernew
Richard A. Cooper
Victor R. Fuchs
Annetine C. Gelijns
Sherry A. Glied
Deborah Haas-Wilson
Mark A. Hall
Peter J. Hammer
Clark C. Havighurst
Peter D. Jacobson
Richard Kronick
Michael L. Millenson
Jack Needleman
Richard R. Nelson
Mark V. Pauly
Mark A. Peterson
Uwe E. Reinhardt
James C. Robinson
William M. Sage
J. B. Silvers
Frank A. Sloan
Joshua Graff Zivin

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cover of Valuing Health for Policy: An Economic Approach

Valuing Health for Policy

An Economic Approach

Edited by George Tolley, Donald Kenkel, and Robert Fabian

University of Chicago Press, 1994

How much should citizens invest in promoting health, and how should resources be allocated to cover the costs? A major contribution to economic approaches to the value of health, this volume brings together classic and up-to-date research by economists and public health experts on theories and measurements of health values, providing useful information for shaping public policy.
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cover of Your Pocket Is What Cures You: The Politics of Health in Senegal

Your Pocket Is What Cures You

The Politics of Health in Senegal

Foley, Ellen E

Rutgers University Press, 2009

In the wake of structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and health reforms in the 1990s, the majority of sub-Saharan African governments spend less than ten dollars per capita on health annually, and many Africans have limited access to basic medical care. Using a community-level approach, anthropologist Ellen E. Foley analyzes the implementation of global health policies and how they become intertwined with existing social and political inequalities in Senegal. Your Pocket Is What Cures You examines qualitative shifts in health and healing spurred by these reforms, and analyzes the dilemmas they create for health professionals and patients alike. It also explores how cultural frameworks, particularly those stemming from Islam and Wolof ethnomedicine, are central to understanding how people manage vulnerability to ill health.

While offering a critique of neoliberal health policies, Your Pocket Is What Cures You remains grounded in ethnography to highlight the struggles of men and women who are precariously balanced on twin precipices of crumbling health systems and economic decline. Their stories demonstrate what happens when market-based health reforms collide with material, political, and social realities in African societies.

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