Competing solutions

Sample

William Jack

Health indicators in developing countries have shown impressive improvements in the past 50 years. But the health status of individuals in these countries remains well below its potential level, and many people lack access to suitable health care and health-promoting services. This book attempts to provide a suitable economic framework that will foster an understanding of the allocation of broadly defined health care resources, and to aid the design and analysis of policies that affect health outcomes. It addressed both positive and normative issues in the economics of health, and in this sense is similar in approach, if not in scope, to public finance texts. Indeed, in many respects, the book represents an application of public economics, including developments in the past 20 years in the economics of information and incentives, to the analysis of health care resource allocations. Part I focuses on health outcomes and the relationships between such outcomes and orthodox variables that measure macroeconomic performance. Part II adopts a more macroeconomic focus in analyzing demand and supply in health care markets. Part III takes on a more normative approach, reviewing both projects and policies. An attempt to address some broad issues in the design and implementation of national health systems can be found in the last chapter.

Sample

John P. Geyman

"This pragmatic, objective approach to the complex issues surrounding the U.S. health care system successfully bridges the world of health economists/health analysts/policy makers with that of clinicians. Focusing on the main problems-escalating costs, limitations of access, and a wide variety of quallity care-this unique book helps you better understand the rapidly changing and complex world of health care"--Back cover.

Sample

Dina Balabanova, Martin McKee and Anne Mills

Reviews the progress in five countries towards the goals set out in `Good health and low cost' - London : Rockefeller Foundation, 1985 ; and what happened to others viewed as successes 25 years ago -- [foreword, ix].

Sample

Jacob S. Hacker

During the 1992 presidential campaign, health care reform became a hot issue, paving the way for one of the most important yet ill-fated social policy initiatives in American history: Bill Clinton's 1993 proposal for comprehensive coverage under "managed competition." Here Jacob Hacker not only investigates for the first time how managed competition became the president's reform framework, but also illuminates how issues and policies emerge. He follows Clinton's policy ideas from their initial formulation by policy experts through their endorsement by medical industry leaders and politicians to their inclusion - in a new and unexpected form - in the proposal itself. Throughout he explores key questions: Why did health reform become a national issue in the 1990s? Why did Clinton choose managed competition over more familiar options during the 1992 presidential campaign? What effect did this have on the fate of his proposal? . Drawing on records of the president's task force, interviews with a wide range of key policy players, and many other sources, Hacker locates his analysis within the context of current political theories of agenda setting. He concludes that Clinton chose managed competition partly because advocates inside and outside the campaign convinced him that it represented a unique middle road to health care reform. This conviction, Hacker maintains, blinded the president and his allies to the political risks of the approach and hindered the development of an effective strategy for enacting it.