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Mencher spent a year in Great Britain (1965-1966) interviewing leaders of professional medical associations, executives of the health insurance societies, and general practitioners and specialists engaged in private practice. His study of the private medical service twenty years after the passage of the National Health Service Act reviews the changes, problems, and successes of the National Health Service.

Medical economics.

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Health economics has become an established field of enquiry over recent years and is now an important contributor to normative health policy, and decisions concerning the allocation of resources and the quality of healthcare provision across the world.

Medical Economics, written by two physicians who are also qualified economists, introduces readers to the core economic considerations in healthcare provision and management. Addressing concerns that are relevant to both the individual and to public health, the authors draw on a wider range of economic tools and analytical frameworks than typically offered by standard textbooks. Combining thought experiments with real-world examples they illustrate the healthcare challenges facing today's policy-makers.

The book is aimed specifically at courses in medicine, public health, and healthcare management and administration, but also at economists looking for a broader perspective on healthcare systems, including healthcare financing, markets, the role of the state and other macroeconomic considerations, evaluation methods, healthcare technology, paying for medical care, health insurance and ethical issues.

Medical economics.

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We address long-standing problems in measuring health care prices by estimating two medical care price indices. The first, a Service Price Index, prices specific medical services, as does the current CPI. The second, a Cost of Living Index, measures the net valuation of treating a health problem. We apply these indices to heart attack treatment between 1983 and 1994. Because of technological change and increasing price discounts, the current CPI overstates a chain-weighted price index by three percentage points annually. For plausible values of an additional life-year, the real Cost of Living Index fell about 1 percent annually.

Medical economics

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Medical economics

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In this paper, we examine the effects of likely demographic changes on medical spending for the elderly. Standard forecasts highlight the potential for greater life expectancy to increase costs: medical costs generally increase with age, and greater life expectancy means that more of the elderly will be in the older age groups. Two factors work in the other direction, however. First, increases in life expectancy mean that a smaller share of the elderly will be in the last year of life, when medical costs generally are very high. Furthermore, more of the elderly will be dying at older ages, and end-of-life costs typically decline with age at death. Second, disability rates among the surviving population have been declining in recent years by 0.5 to 1.5 percent annually. Reductions in disability, if sustained, will also reduce medical spending. Thus, changes in disability and mortality should, on net, reduce average medical spending on the elderly. However, these effects are not as large as the projected increase in medical spending stemming from increases in overall medical costs. Technological change in medicine at anywhere near its historic rate would still result in a substantial public sector burden for medical costs.

Medical economics.