Introducing Market Forces Into Health Care

Designed as a primary text for courses in health care economics and policy analysis, this comprehensive work places the issues and economic analysis of the health care industry in the context of market forces driving the industry, including negotiated markets, managed care, and the growing influence of oligopolies. Written in accessible prose, without the aid of technical jargon and mathematical formulations, the content is rich with applicable, understandable economic concepts and analysis, and examples of market failure and government involvement. Some of the major policy issues covered are drug pricing, Medicare and Medicaid reform, the medically uninsured, for-profit hospital monopoly price power, managed care competitive pricing, and new negotiated markets. The relevant economic concepts employed in the text include price elasticity of demand/supply, market structure from competitive to oligopolistic markets, monopoly pricing power, measures of health care inflation and the biases of the CPI, demand and supply factors, inverse relationship of present health care expenditures as a percentage of GDP, measures/concepts of efficiency, and the role of government in a market era.

How does the market affect and redefine healthcare? The marketisation of Western healthcare systems has now proceeded well into its fourth decade. But the nature and meaning of the phenomenon has become increasingly opaque amidst changing discourses, policies and institutional structures. Moreover, ethics has become focussed on dealing with individual, clinical decisions and neglectful of the political economy which shapes healthcare. This interdisciplinary volume approaches marketisation by exploring the debates underlying the contemporary situation and by introducing reconstructive and reparative discourses. The first part explores contrary interpretations of ‘marketisation’ on a systemic level, with a view to organisational-ethical formation and the role of healthcare ethics. The second part presents the marketisation of healthcare at the level of policy-making, discusses the ethical ramifications of specific marketisation measures and considers the possibility of reconciling market forces with a covenantal understanding of healthcare. The final part examines healthcare workers’ and ethicists’ personal moral standing in a marketised healthcare system, with a view to preserving and enriching virtue, empathy and compassion. Chapters 4 and 7 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

"[This book is] the most authoritative assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of recent trends toward the commercialization of health care," says Robert Pear of The New York Times. This major study by the Institute of Medicine examines virtually all aspects of for-profit health care in the United States, including the quality and availability of health care, the cost of medical care, access to financial capital, implications for education and research, and the fiduciary role of the physician. In addition to the report, the book contains 15 papers by experts in the field of for-profit health care covering a broad range of topicsâ€"from trends in the growth of major investor-owned hospital companies to the ethical issues in for-profit health care. "The report makes a lasting contribution to the health policy literature." â€"Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law.

Introducing Market Forces into "Public" Services is the fourth volume in Liberty Fund's The Collected Works of Arthur Seldon. It brings together six of Seldon's most pivotal essays that discuss his alternative proposals for paying for "public" services rather than through coercive taxation. Specifically, Seldon focuses on the varied use of vouchers and the choices people have regarding purchasing or receiving such public services as health care and education. The recurring theme, as noted in Colin Robinson's introduction, is that "non-market provision, financed by taxpayers, leads to a fatal disconnection between suppliers and consumers." Throughout this book, Seldon examines the options and obligations of the government as the "middle-man." Seldon creates a compelling case that through a return to market principles, "efficiency in the provision of these services will improve, and, above all, people will regain the incentive to provide for themselves instead of relying on the state." This volume is an invaluable resource for those embroiled in the public debate over such issues as education vouchers, managed health care, and overwhelming taxation. Arthur Seldon has been writing on classical liberal economics since the 1930s, when he was a student at the London School of Economics during Friedrich Hayek's time there. For over thirty years, from the late 1950s, he was Editorial Director of the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs, where his publishing program was one of the principal influences on governments all around the world, persuading them to liberalize their economies. His Collected Works in these seven volumes are a major contribution to classical liberal thought. Colin Robinson was a business economist for eleven years. He was then appointed to the Chair of Economics at the University of Surrey, Guildford, United Kingdom, where he founded the Department of Economics and is now Emeritus Professor. He is the author of 23 books and over 150 scholarly articles and has edited many other books. For many years he has been associated with the Institute of Economic Affairs and from 1992 to 2002 he was the IEA's Editorial Director.

From Harry and Louise through the McCaughey septuplets, this book explains stories and issues in health care ethics that have appeared in the news media. This second edition contains extensive new material and new topics, including physician-assisted suicide, managed care, organ donation, genetic testing, cloning, and the question of futility. Aimed at a wide audience, this book will also be useful for introductory ethics courses in colleges and high schools.

Drawing on the work of the Roundtable on Evidence-Based Medicine, the 2007 IOM Annual Meeting assessed some of the rapidly occurring changes in health care related to new diagnostic and treatment tools, emerging genetic insights, the developments in information technology, and healthcare costs, and discussed the need for a stronger focus on evidence to ensure that the promise of scientific discovery and technological innovation is efficiently captured to provide the right care for the right patient at the right time. As new discoveries continue to expand the universe of medical interventions, treatments, and methods of care, the need for a more systematic approach to evidence development and application becomes increasingly critical. Without better information about the effectiveness of different treatment options, the resulting uncertainty can lead to the delivery of services that may be unnecessary, unproven, or even harmful. Improving the evidence-base for medicine holds great potential to increase the quality and efficiency of medical care. The Annual Meeting, held on October 8, 2007, brought together many of the nation's leading authorities on various aspects of the issues - both challenges and opportunities - to present their perspectives and engage in discussion with the IOM membership.

Outstanding Academic Title for 2007, Choice Magazine Much has been written about medicine and the market in recent years. This book is the first to include an assessment of market influence in both developed and developing countries, and among the very few that have tried to evaluate the actual health and economic impact of market theory and practices in a wide range of national settings. Tracing the path that market practices have taken from Adam Smith in the eighteenth century into twenty-first-century health care, Daniel Callahan and Angela A. Wasunna add a fresh dimension: they compare the different approaches taken in the market debate by health care economists, conservative market advocates, and liberal supporters of single-payer or government-regulated systems. In addition to laying out the market-versus-government struggle around the world—from Canada and the United States to Western Europe, Latin America, and many African and Asian countries—they assess the leading market practices, such as competition, physician incentives, and co-payments, for their economic and health efficacy to determine whether they work as advertised. This timely and necessary book engages new dimensions of a development that has urgent consequences for the delivery of health care worldwide.