A. Culyer – Encyclopedia of Health Economics

Автор: A. Culyer
Название книги: Encyclopedia of Health Economics
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Экономика Здравоохранения, Организация здравоохранения, Менеджмент и управление в здравоохранении
Страницы: 1662
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

The Encyclopedia of Health Economics offers students, researchers and policymakers objective and detailed empirical analysis and clear reviews of current theories and polices. It helps practitioners such as health care managers and planners by providing accessible overviews into the broad field of health economics, including the economics of designing health service finance and delivery and the economics of public and population health. This encyclopedia provides an organized overview of this diverse field, providing one trusted source for up-to-date research and analysis of this highly charged and fast-moving subject area.
Features research-driven articles that are objective, better-crafted, and more detailed than is currently available in journals and handbooks
Combines insights and scholarship across the breadth of health economics, where theory and empirical work increasingly come from non-economists
Provides overviews of key policies, theories and programs in easy-to-understand language

What Do Health Economists Do?
This encyclopedia gives the reader ample opportunity to read
about what it is that health economists do and the ways in
which they set about doing it. One may suppose that health
economics consist of no more than the application of the
discipline of economics (that is, economic theory and economic
ways of doing empirical work) to the two topics of
health and healthcare. However, although that would usefully
uncouple ‘economics’ from an exclusive association with ‘the
(monetized) economy,’ markets, and prices, it would miss out
a great deal of what it is that health economists actually do,
irrespective of whether they are being descriptive, theoretical,
or applied. One distinctive characteristic of health economics
is the way in which there has been a process of absorption into
it (and, undoubtedly, from it too); in particular, the absorption
of ideas and ways of working from biostatistics,
clinical subjects, cognitive psychology, decision theory, demography,
epidemiology, ethics, political science, public administration,
and other disciplines already associated with
‘health services research’ (HSR) and, although more narrowly,
‘health technology assessment’ (HTA). But to identify health
economics with HSR or HTA would also miss much else that
health economists do.
… And How Do They Do It?
As for the ways in which they do it, in practice, the overwhelming
majority of health economists use the familiar
theoretical tools of neoclassical economics, although by no
means all (possibly not even a majority) are committed to the
welfarist (specifically the Paretian) approach usually adopted
by mainstream economists when addressing normative issues,
which actually turns out to have been a territory in which
some of the most innovative ideas of health economics have
been generated. Health economists are also more guarded
than most other economists in their use of the postulates
of soi-disant ‘rationality’ and in their beliefs about what unregulated
markets can achieve. To study healthcare markets is
emphatically not, of course, necessarily to advocate their use