Health, Health Care and Health Economics: Perspectives on Distribution - Hardcover

The economics of health care has become an issue for both academics and policymakers in developed countries as the mounting costs of comprehensive care becomes a matter of concern. Insights into relationships and interactions among patients, physicians and hospitals, insurers and payers, and government regulators have drawn on the economic tools of price theory, cost-benefit analysis, theories of moral hazard and adverse selection, and the dynamics of the insurance market. This text offers an international perspective on the distribution of health care costs.

Distributional considerations are of central importance in the evolution of health care systems. Who gets served, who pays, and how, as a result, improved health is distributed, are among the pressing issues addressed in this volume. Health, Health Care and Health Economics: Perspectives on Distribution focuses on fundamental issues of equity or distribution in health care and health, and provides a stimulating and provocative discussion of the:

• Persistence of inequalities despite policy interventions designed to remove economic barriers to access to care

• Association between income and income inequalities on the one hand and health inequalities on the other

• Under-emphasis on matters of distribution, relative to issues of efficiency, in much of the health economics research to date, and the potential policy distortions thereby created.

This volume will be an indispensable sourcebook for all health economists as well as health care policy makers and managers.

'This book recognizes a milestone in the evolution of health economics as a discipline.' Joseph P. Newhouse, Harvard University Boston, Massachusetts, USA