This chapter reviews topics related to the demand for health insurance, including the question of how choice of health insurance should be structured for consumers. After the first section summarizes some of the institutional features of health insurance in high- and middle-income countries, a...

By 1993, over 70 of all Americans with health insurance were enrolled in some form of managed care plan. The term managed care encompasses a diverse array of institutional arrangements, which combine various sets of mechanisms, that, in turn, have changed over time. The chapter reviews these...

This chapter summarizes the many aspects of public policy for health care. I first consider government policy affecting individual behaviors. Government intervention to change individual actions such as smoking and drinking is frequently justified on externality grounds. External costs of...