The Elgar Companion To Health Economics

‘This Companion is a timely addition. . . It contains 50 chapters, from 90 contributors around the world, on the topical and policy-relevant aspects of health economics. . . there is a balanced coverage of theoretical and empirical materials, and conceptual and practical issues. . . I have found the Companion very useful.’
– Sukhan Jackson, Economic Analysis and Policy

‘This encyclopedic work provides interested readers with an authoritative and comprehensive overview of many, if not all, of the current research issues in health economics. Highly recommended. Upper-level undergraduates and above.’
– R.M. Mullner, Choice

The aim of The Elgar Companion to Health Economics is to take an audience of advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers to the frontier of research in health economics, by providing them with short and easily readable introductions to key topics. The volume brings together 50 chapters written by more than 90 leading international contributors. The contributions to the Companion are concise and focus on specific concepts, methods and key evidence.

The Companion is a comprehensive and authoritative original reference volume covering theoretical and empirical issues in health economics with a balanced range of material on equity and efficiency in health care systems, health technology assessment and issues of concern for low and middle income countries. It is organised into two broad sections. The first deals with the economics of population health and of health care systems, analysed with both equity and efficiency goals in mind. The second covers the conceptual and practical issues that arise in the evaluation of health care technologies: most often applied to pharmaceuticals but also relevant for other interventions.

Many of the contributions address topical and policy-relevant issues including: the economic causes of the growth of obesity in the West, the link between illicit drug use and crime, the consequences of leaving people uninsured against the costs of health care, the impact of globalisation on the international trade in health care services, the role of informal payments in many health care systems, what ‘equal treatment for equal needs’ means in practice, whether direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals is desirable, and how economic evidence is influencing the way that new technologies are made available to patients. Other chapters stress the research done by health economists to develop theoretical models and empirical methods that illuminate the workings of health care systems.

Contents:
Introduction
Andrew M. Jones
POPULATION HEALTH AND HEALTH CARE SYSTEMS
PART I POPULATION HEALTH
1. Macroeconomic Conditions, Health and Mortality
Christopher J. Ruhm
2. The Dynamics of Health
Andrew M. Jones, Nigel Rice and Paul Contoyannis,
3. Health and Work of Older Workers
Maarten Lindeboom
4. Using Observational Data to Identify the Causal Effects of Health-related Behaviour
M. Christopher Auld
5. Economics of Public Health Interventions for Children in Developing Countries
David Bishai and Taghreed Adam
6. Health Behaviours Among Young People
Don Kenkel
7. Economics of Obesity
Darius Lakdawalla and Tomas J. Philipson
8. Illicit Drugs and Drug-related Crime
Jody L. Sindelar and Todd A. Olmstead
PART II HEALTH CARE FINANCE, EXPENDITURE AND USE
9. The Value of Health Insurance
John A. Nyman
10. Incentive and Selection Effects in Health Insurance
Pierre-Yves Geoffard
11. Prescription Drug Insurance and Reimbursement
Paul Grootendorst
12. The Economics of Social Health Insurance
Peter Zweifel and Friedrich Breyer
13. Competition and Health Plan Choice
Bryan Dowd and Roger Feldman
14. Empirical Models of Health Care Use
Partha Deb and Pravin K. Trivedi
15. The Unofficial Health Care Economy in Low- and Middle-income Countries
Tim Ensor and Robin Thompson
16. Trade in Health Services: Current Challenges and Future Prospects of Globalization
Richard Smith
PART III EQUITY IN HEALTH AND HEALTH CARE
17. Decomposition of Inequalities in Health and Health Care
Owen O'Donnell, Eddy van Doorslaer and Adam Wagstaff
18. Economic Studies of Equity in the Consumption of Health Care
Hugh Gravelle, Stephen Morris and Matt Sutton
19. Equity in Health and Health Care Systems in Asia
Ravindra Rannan-Eliya and Aparnaa Somanathan
PART IV ORGANIZATION OF HEALTH CARE MARKETS
20. Hospital Competition and Patient Choice in Publicly Funded Health Care
Richard Cookson and Diane Dawson
21. Models of Negotiation and Bargaining in Health Care
Pedro Pita Barros and Xavier Martinez-Giralt
22. Contracts, Information and Incentives in Health Care
Martin Chalkley
23. Contracting-out Health Service Provision in Resource- and Information-poor Settings
Natasha Palmer and Anne Mills
PART V PROVIDER REIMBURSEMENT, INCENTIVES AND BEHAVIOUR
24. The Physician as the Patient’s Agent
Thomas Rice
25. Capitation and Incentives in Primary Care
Tor Iversen and Hilde Lurås
26. Optimal Risk Adjustment
Jacob Glazer and Thomas G. McGuire
27. The Role of Economic Incentives in Improving the Quality of Mental Health Care
Susan L. Ettner and Michael Schoenbaum
28. Nursing Home Quality of Care
David C. Grabowski and Edward C. Norton
29. Direct to Consumer Advertising
W. David Bradford and Andrew N. Kleit
PART VI ASSESSING THE PERFORMANCE OF HEALTH CARE ORGANIZATIONS
30. Concepts and Challenges in Measuring the Performance of Health Care Organizations
Peter C. Smith and Andrew Street
31. The Use of Performance Measures in Health Care Systems
Carol Propper and Deborah Wilson
32. Productivity Analysis in Health Care
James F. Burgess, Jr
EVALUATION OF HEALTH CARE
PART VII MEASURING BENEFITS
33. Conceptual Foundations for Health Utility Measurement
Han Bleichrodt and Jose Luis Pinto
34. The Multi-attribute Utility Approach to Assessing Health-related Quality of Life
David Feeny
35. Methods for Developing Preference-based Measures of Health
John Brazier and Jennifer Roberts
36. The Elicitation of Distributional Judgements in the Context of Economic Evaluation
Paul Dolan and Aki Tsuchiya
37. Contingent Valuation in Health Care
Cam Donaldson, Helen Mason and Phil Shackley
38. Using Discrete Choice Experiments in Health Economics
Mandy Ryan, Karen Gerard and Gillian Currie
39. Design of Choice Experiments in Health Economics
Leonie Burgess, Deborah J. Street, Rosalie Viney and Jordan Louviere
PART VIII MEASURING COSTS AND STATISTICAL ISSUES
40. Estimating Costs for Economic Evaluation
Maria Raikou and Alistair McGuire
41. Dealing with Skewed Data on Costs and Expenditures
Willard Manning
42. Future Costs in Medical Cost-effectiveness Analysis
David Meltzer
43. Selection Bias in Observational Data
Daniel Polsky and Anirban Basu
PART IX ECONOMIC EVALUATION AND DECISION MAKING
44. Decision Rules for Incremental Cost-effectiveness Analysis
Milton C. Weinstein
45. Generalized Cost-effectiveness Analysis: Principles and Practice
David B. Evans, Dan Chisholm and Tessa Tan-Torres Edejer
46. Decision Rules in Economic Evaluation
Stephen Birch and Amiram Gafni
47. Statistical Methods for Cost-effectiveness Analysis Alongside Clinical Trials
Andrew Briggs
48. Decision-making with Uncertainty: The Value of Information
Karl Claxton, Elizabeth Fenwick and Mark J. Sculpher
49. Perspectives on Mean-based Evaluation of Health Care
David J. Vanness and John Mullahy
50. Economic Evaluation and Decision-makers
Michael Drummond
Index