Contents: Preface -- Part I: Active learning assignments -- 1. Introduction to learning and teaching health economics / Allen C. Goodman and Maia Platt -- 2. The health insurance game / Jennifer Kohn -- 3. Assessing competency in health economics using portfolios / Neha Batura, Hassan...

This article addresses costs and utilization for mental health/substance abuse treatment, with particular emphasis on the emerging importance of self-insured coverage in the 1990s. We estimate drug abuse treatment demand and utilization with an insurance claims database from self-insured...

The payment scale format has been widely used in willingness-to-pay studies in health care. Concerns have been expressed that the format is, in theory, prone to range bias, although this proposition has not been tested directly. We report the findings of a contingent valuation questionnaire...

‘Menorrhagia’, or heavy menstrual bleeding, is a common problem affecting women. The principal driver for treatment is women's experience of its interference in their lives, so a measure of quality of life (QoL) is increasingly used as the primary outcome to assess treatment success. QoL...

An examination of the willingness to pay values elicited from more than 3000 persons involved in three independent studies revealed that the majority had offered one of a limited number of values from the ranges available to them. These values were 'prominent numbers', the use of which has been...

Health economists use “willingness-to-pay” to assess the prospective value of novel interventions. The technique remains controversial, not least with respect to the formats under which values are elicited. The paper analyses the results of a series of studies of the same intervention valued...

This paper presents a South African case study as a contribution to international debates about the policy challenges posed by health sector commercialisation. It shows that the South African health system was highly commercialised before 1994, and fragmented between the private sector, serving...