Towards an alternative economics of health care

Towards an alternative economics of health care.

It is argued here that an economics centred on subjective utility-maximization is unsuitable for the analysis and policy grounding of health care provision. To some extent, the peculiarities of health care have been recognized by mainstream health economists, who sometimes abandon Paretian welfare considerations to focus on needs instead. This article examines important peculiarities of health ...

Situating Care in Health Economics

Towards an Economics of Evaluation

This article probes the contrasting traditions of economics and evaluation and shows that intensified collaboration would benefit both professions. While evaluators have long been examining the impact of economic advice on public policy, economists have neglected evaluation both as a platform for testing economic policy hypotheses and as a topic for economic research in its own right. To encour...

Health Care and Behavioral Economics

It has been said that “goodness without knowledge is weak and feeble, yet knowledge without goodness is dangerous.”1 Peter Diamond is one of those extremely rare people who combine knowledge and goodness. Indeed—and I hope this doesn’t offend anyone in the room—Peter is probably the smartest person I know. In addition to that, he is simply a wonderful person and colleague. I am thrilled that th...

Individual Health Accounts: An Alternative Health Care Financing Approach

After examining the major determinants of inefficiency in health care markets and several recent proposals to correct these problems, this paper introduces a market-oriented alternative which could be highly efficient while meeting all the established goals of a national health plan. To achieve these objectives, traditional forms of insurance would be replaced by a system with the following cha...