Medical Economics

Medical Economics (and Politics)

G et ready! The landscape in medicine is probably going to change rapidly. The starting bell rang in December 2010 in Washington, DC, with very little fanfare when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned doctors from prescribing Avastin to patients with advanced-stage breast cancer. 1 Avastin, a potent but costly drug, has worked in some clinical trials by halting the spread of cancer and...

Topics in medical economics: medical malpractice.

Medical economics and medical ethics: points of conflict and reconciliation.

I refer to the transformation of the valid economic necessity to contain costs into an ideology a self-justifying principle that threatens to assume quasi-moral stature. One consequence is the self-righteous pursuit of economic goals that may obscure our obligations to the sick. Another is the commercialization of the healing relationship by the growing pressure to use competition as a cost con...

The economics of graduate medical education.

n engl j med 370;25 nejm.org june 19, 2014 2357 trained and influences their specialty choices by subsidizing the cost of training. Total federal GME funding amounts to nearly $16 billion annually. Medicare is the largest federal government contributor to GME, providing $9.5 billion — almost $3 billion for direct medical education (DME), to pay the salaries of residents and supervising physicia...

Topics in medical economics: health care rationing.