Verlagsinfo: "A health-economics textbook for the rest of us. The economics of healthcare are messy. For most consumers, there's minimal control around costs or services. Sometimes doctors get paid a lot; other times they don't get paid at all. Insurance and drug companies are bad, except when...

Across the globe every nation wrestles with how it will pay for, provide, regulate and administer its healthcare system. Health economics is the field of economics that deals with every one of those issues and the difficult issue of allocating resources where the allocation can literally mean...

Moral hazard--the tendency to change behavior when the cost of that behavior will be borne by others--is a particularly tricky question when considering health care. Kenneth J. Arrow's seminal 1963 paper on this topic (included in this volume) was one of the first to explore the implication of...

Recent data show wide disparity between Japan and the United States in the effectiveness of their health care systems. Japan spends close to the lowest percentage of its gross domestic product on health care among OECD countries, the United States spends the highest, yet life expectancies in...

section 1. Introduction : setting the context -- section 2. Functional description of the U.S. health and medical care system -- section 3. Political and economic values and health care financing -- section 4. Health care reform in the United States : targeted programs and consequences.

The aim of The Elgar Companion to Health Economics is to take an audience of advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers to the frontier of research in health economics, by providing them with short and easily readable introductions to key topics. The volume brings together 50...

This comprehensive collection brings together more than 50 contributions from some of the most influential researchers in health economics. It authoritatively covers theoretical and empirical issues in health economics, with a balanced range of material on equity and efficiency in health care...