Private ownership should generally be preferred to public ownership when the incentives to innovate and to contain costs must be strong. In essence, this is the case for capitalism over socialism, explaining the 'dynamic vitality' of free enterprise. The great economists of the 1930s and 1940s...

In 2011, Bristol-Myers Squibb set the price of its newly approved melanoma drug ipilimumab—brand name Yervoy—at $120,000 for a course of therapy. The drug was associated with an incremental increase in life expectancy of four months. Drugs like ipilimumab have fueled the perception that the...

Donating blood, "the gift of life," is among the noblest activities and it is performed worldwide nearly 100 million times annually. The economic perspective presented here shows how the gift of life, albeit noble and often motivated by altruism, is heavily influenced by standard economic forces...

This paper presents evidence that doctors behave very differently in making treatment recommendations depending on the region where they work, creating large variations in the quantities of care delivered to seemingly standardized populations. This evidence on "variations" (and the failure of...

This brief paper explores the likely effects of government-imposed global budget caps, such as those in the Clinton administration proposal, on health care spending. It argues that health reform proposals that guarantee universal access to a basic package of medical benefits create a substantial...

Physicians and other medical providers are subject to a negligence rule of liability. In a simple model, with perfect information and homogeneous physicians, a negligence rule of liability with an appropriately defined due care standard should induce complete compliance: there should be no...

This paper considers the market for long-term care services to treat and compensate for chronic health conditions and disabilities. This paper describes how the long-term care market has evolved and the resulting implications for expenditure control. It reviews recent developments in marketing...

The economic, social, and political challenges posed by the aging of the population are real in many nations, under virtually any set of assumptions about the future. However, cross-national data on health spending on the elderly, to be presented in the following section, suggest that in health...

Canada's population, a tenth that of the United States, is perched close to the U.S. northern border, tightly but asymmetrically tied to U.S. information networks. However, trade, capital and population mobility remains an order of magnitude tighter among provinces than between provinces and...

Government appears to both promote and mistrust nonprofit organizations in the health sector. Tax exemptions, subsidies, and preferential treatment in contracts support these organizations. Legislation that links the supply of charity care to tax exemptions demonstrates mistrust. In this paper,...