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February
Priority Setting Toolkit: A Guide to the Use of Economics in Health Care Decision Making
Authors: Craig Mitton, Cam Donaldson
ISBN: 0-7279-1736-6
Publisher: Blackwell Publishing
Priority setting is a skill required of anyone in health care management today. This book reviews the different methodologies and comes down firmly in favour of an economics-based approach, namely programme budgeting and marginal analysis (PBMA). Based on their wealth of international experience and unique collaborative research programme, the authors show how PBMA can be used as a vehicle for taking account of the complexities of health care whilst still basing decisions on sound economic concepts. Thus, it is demonstrated that PBMA is not only about economics but also the all important issues of patient and public benefit.
Priority Setting Toolkit is published by Blackwell Publishing (price £19.95). It can ordered from Blackwell
ISBN 0-7279-1736-6
Priority Setting Toolkit provides the academic background as well as the tools for implementation. With its illustrative case histories, this is a unique source of information on this important aspect of getting health economics used in the everyday, but fundamental, practice of managing scarcity. It will help clinicians and managers planning for optimum health care delivery within a fixed budget, as well as health economics students and academics who wish to learn more about helping people manage their resources to improve population health.
With chapters on:
- The basic economic concepts
- Alternative approaches to priority setting
- Review of the PBMA literature
- Putting PBMA into practice
- The challenges of data and time
- The challenge of the programme budget
- The challenge of disinvesting
- The challenge of measuring and valuing benefits
- The challenge of involving the public
- The challenge of the organisation
February 27, 2004: Methodology
February
Your Money or Your Life
Author: David Cutler, Harvard University
ISBN: 0195160428
Publisher: Oxford University Press
The problems of medical care confront us daily: a bureaucracy that makes a trip to the doctor worse than a trip to the dentist, doctors who can't practice medicine the way they choose, more than 40 million people without health insurance. The common, and accurate, message to the public is that medical care is in crisis. Barely one in five Americans thinks the medical system works well.
David M. Cutler, a Harvard economist who served on President Clinton's healthcare task force and later advised presidential candidate Bill Bradley, addresses these issues in "Your Money or Your Life," a new book published by Oxford University Press. One of the nation's leading experts on the subject, Cutler argues that health care has in fact improved exponentially over the last fifty years, and that the successes of our system suggest ways in which we might improve care, make the system easier to deal with, and extend coverage to all Americans. Cutler applies an economic analysis to show that our spending on medicine generates benefits in excess of the costs -- and that the United States could improve welfare further by increasing spending. Additionally, millions of people with easily manageable diseases, from hypertension to depression to diabetes, receive either too much or too little care because of inefficiencies in the way we reimburse care, resulting in poor health and in some cases premature death.
The key to improving the system, Cutler argues, is to change the way we organize health care. He asserts that everyone must be insured for the medical system to perform well, and that payments should be based on quality, not just on the volume or technical complexity, of the services provided.
Lively and compelling, Your Money or Your Life offers a realistic yet rigorous economic approach to reforming healthcare--one that should prove to be a significant contributor toward breaking the stalemate of failed reform.
Oxford University Press
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Economics/Health/
176 pages; 3 line illus.; Feb 2004, ISBN 0195160428
February
Health Policy and the Uninsured
Editor: Catherine G. McLaughlin
ISBN: 0-87766-719-5
Publisher: The Urban Institute Press
The United States is unique in the industrialized world in the number of people without health insurance. In 2002, nearly 44 million Americans did not have health insurance coverage. Despite long-running study of this problem, the political debate on health insurance is often based on conventional wisdom and studies that haven't been integrated into a careful theoretical framework. In Health Policy and the Uninsured, leading experts in health policy survey the literature on this subject, synthesizing a wide range of health insurance studies into a comprehensive overview of the uninsured. They consider the methodological hurdles involved in the research, explore the complex interaction between health insurance and labor supply, and highlight the special issues facing children, racial or ethnic minorities and immigrants, the near-elderly, and people with psychiatric or substance abuse disorders. This coordinated critique serves several purposes: First, it summarizes for policy makers what we do not know about the uninsured. Second, it provides a framework for the health policy research needed to fill the remaining gaps in our knowledge. And finally, it serves as a useful primer for economists and other policy analysts.
Contributors: David Colby, Sarah E. Crowe, Mary Harrington, Hanns Kuttner, Pamela Farley Short, Linda J. Blumberg, Len Nichols, Jonathon Gruber, Brigitte C. Madrian, Helen Levy, David Meltzer, Harold Pollack, Karl Kronebusch, Michael E. Chernew, and Richard A. Hirth.
$29.50, 356 pages. Ordering Information. More information on Health Policy and the Uninsured