Information and markets; market failure; internal markets; rationing; waiting; discrimination; public goods and exter- nalities; regulation (entry/exit); price controls; institutional subsidies; welfare economics and system evaluation; compar- ative systems.
The Right Price: A Value-Based Prescription for Drug Costs Paperback, 272 pages, ISBN: 9780197512876, published 12 October 2021 You can support the blog by buying books through one of our affiliate links. If you’re in the UK, visit our shop on… Read More »Review: The Right Price (Peter Neumann et al)
Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow passed away on February 21, 2017. In a classic, fifty-year-old paper entitled Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care, Arrow discussed how: “the operation of the medical-care industry and the efficacy with which it satisfies… Read More »Kenneth Arrow on healthcare economics: a 21st century appreciation
One of the major challenges to affordable, universal health insurance is the high cost of providing care to the sickest patients. According to Roy Vaughn, senior vice president at BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, “just 5 percent of the company’s marketplace… Read More »Sharing the burden of healthcare: providing care to our sickest patients
The UN Secretary General’s High Level Panel on Access to Medicines recently published its long awaited report Promoting innovation and access to health technologies. The report explores and proposes some solutions to the well recognised problem of under-investment in research and… Read More »Access to medicines and medical technologies for the global poor
Free to choose? Reform, choice, and consideration sets in the English National Health Service. M Gaynor, C Propper, and S Seiler. 2016. American Economic Review [RePEc] Forthcoming The enhancement of patient choice about healthcare provider is a popular target for reform across many European… Read More »Free to choose?: A comment on Gaynor, Propper, and Seiler (2016)
I was recently questioned about the future of the NHS, during a live debate on the BBC Radio 4 programme Moral Maze, on 9 July 2014. One of the panelists took me to task for being a “bean counter”. I… Read More »Bean counting and the NHS
Steven Levitt and his trusty Freakonomics sidekick were invited by David Cameron to advise on health policy, as they recount in their latest book. Apparently the PM walked out on them. Levitt has kindly given us some more details on his proposal for British healthcare. It consisted of… Read More »Recommended reading for Steven Levitt
Shortly after reading William Baumol’s new book ‘The Cost Disease: Why Computers Get Cheaper and Health Care Doesn’t‘, I thought that its subject matter – rising healthcare costs – may make a good subject for a post. However, John Appleby… Read More »The cost disease
Ben Goldacre, author of Bad Science, recently published an article online for his Guardian column discussing hospital level variation in Bowel Cancer mortality. In this article he discusses how journalists often see patterns in random variation, to which he responds… Read More »Cause and effect: Hospital choice and rankings
We have recently seen the idea of buying/selling/trading organs thrust into the media spotlight (and not for the first time). There’s a lot of very poor thinking floating around in this debate, though Sue Rabbitt Roff’s recent paper, which helped fuel the… Read More »Paying for organs