Health economics is a branch of economics concerned with issues related to efficiency, effectiveness, value and behavior in the production and consumption of health and healthcare. Health economics is important in determining how to improve health outcomes and lifestyle patterns through interactions between individuals, healthcare providers and clinical settings. In broad terms, health economists study the functioning of healthcare systems and health-affecting behaviors such as smoking, diabetes, and obesity.
Mark Barr McClellan is the director of the Robert J Margolis Center for Health Policy and the Margolis Professor of Business, Medicine and Health Policy at Duke University. Formerly, he was a senior fellow and director of the Health Care Innovation and Value Initiative at the Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform at The Brookings Institution, in Washington, D.C. McClellan served as commissioner of the United States Food and Drug Administration under President George W. Bush from 2002 through 2004, and subsequently as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services from 2004 through 2006.
The term managed care or managed healthcare is used in the United States to describe a group of activities intended to reduce the cost of providing health care and providing American health insurance while improving the quality of that care. It has become the predominant system of delivering and receiving American health care since its implementation in the early 1980s, and has been largely unaffected by the Affordable Care Act of 2010.
...intended to reduce unnecessary health care costs through a variety of mechanisms, including: economic incentives for physicians and patients to select less costly forms of care; programs for reviewing the medical necessity of specific services; increased beneficiary cost sharing; controls on inpatient admissions and lengths of stay; the establishment of cost-sharing incentives for outpatient surgery; selective contracting with health care providers; and the intensive management of high-cost health care cases. The programs may be provided in a variety of settings, such as Health Maintenance Organizations and Preferred Provider Organizations.
The RAND Health Insurance Experiment was an experimental study from 1974 to 1982 of health care costs, utilization and outcomes in the United States, which assigned people randomly to different kinds of plans and followed their behavior. Because it was a randomized controlled trial, it provided stronger evidence than the more common observational studies and concluded that cost sharing reduced "inappropriate or unnecessary" medical care (overutilization) but also reduced "appropriate or needed" medical care.
David Matthew Cutler is the Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics at Harvard University. He was given a five-year term appointment of Harvard College Professor, which recognizes excellence in undergraduate teaching. He holds a joint appointment in the economics department and at Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard School of Public Health, is a faculty member for the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, and serves as commissioner on the Massachusetts Health Policy Commission.
Uwe Ernst Reinhardt was a professor of political economy at Princeton University and held several positions in the healthcare industry. Reinhardt was a prominent scholar in health care economics and a frequent speaker and author on subjects ranging from the war in Iraq to the future of Medicare.
Consumer-driven healthcare (CDHC), or consumer-driven health plans (CDHP) refers to a type of health insurance plan that allows employers and/or employees to utilize pretax money to help pay for medical expenses not covered by their health plan. These plans are linked to health savings accounts (HSAs), health reimbursement accounts (HRAs), or similar medical payment accounts. Users keep any unused balance or "rollover" at the end of the year to increase future balances or to invest for future expenses. They are a high-deductible health plan which has cheaper premiums but higher out of pocket expenses, and as such are seen as a cost effective means for companies to provide health care for their employees.
William C. Hsiao, an American economist, is the K.T. Li Research Professor of Economics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. He is internationally recognized for his work on health care financing and social insurance.
Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century is a report on health care quality in the United States published by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) on March 1, 2001. A follow-up to the frequently cited 1999 IOM patient safety report To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System, Crossing the Quality Chasm advocates for a fundamental redesign of the U.S. health care system.
Don E. Detmer is professor emeritus and professor of medical education at the University of Virginia.
Mary Wakefield is an American nurse and health care administrator, who served in the Obama administration as acting United States Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services from 2015 to 2017, and as head of the Health Resources and Services Administration from 2009 to 2015.
Norman Daniels is an American political philosopher and philosopher of science, political theorist, ethicist, and bioethicist at Harvard University and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Before his career at Harvard, Daniels had built his career as a medical ethicist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and at Tufts University School of Medicine, also in Boston. He also developed the concept of accountability for reasonableness with James Sabin, an ethics framework used to challenge the healthcare resource allocation in the 1990s.
There were a number of different health care reforms proposed during the Obama administration. Key reforms address cost and coverage and include obesity, prevention and treatment of chronic conditions, defensive medicine or tort reform, incentives that reward more care instead of better care, redundant payment systems, tax policy, rationing, a shortage of doctors and nurses, intervention vs. hospice, fraud, and use of imaging technology, among others.
Healthcare in the United States is largely provided by private sector healthcare facilities, and paid for by a combination of public programs, private insurance, and out-of-pocket payments. The U.S. is the only developed country without a system of universal healthcare, and a significant proportion of its population lacks health insurance.
Karen Davis is president of The Commonwealth Fund, a national philanthropy engaged in independent research on health and social policy issues. Davis is an economist, with a career in public policy and research. Before joining The Commonwealth Fund, she served as chairman of the Department of Health Policy and Management at The Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, where she also held an appointment as professor of economics. She served as deputy assistant secretary for health policy in the Department of Health and Human Services from 1977–1980, becoming the first woman to head a U.S. public health service agency.
Rashi Fein was an American health economist termed "a father of Medicare" in the United States and "an architect of Medicare", was Professor of Economics of Medicine, Emeritus, in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and the author of the book Medical Care, Medical Costs: The Search for a Health Insurance Policy.
Mark V. Pauly is an American economist whose work focuses on healthcare management and business economics. He is currently the Bendheim Professor in the Department of Health Care Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Pauly is a former commissioner on the Physician Payment Review Commission, and has been a consultant to the Congressional Budget Office, the Office of the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the American Enterprise Institute, and served on the Medicare Technical Advisory Panel. He is also the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Springer journal International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics, and was formerly the Robert D. Eilers Professor from 1984 to 1989.
Yuting Zhang is a professor of health economics at the University of Melbourne, and an expert on economic evaluations of health policy and healthcare reforms. She is a journal editor, award recipient, and has written numerous articles in influential journals in her field.
Kate Ho is an economics professor at Princeton University. Since July 2018, Professor Ho has worked in partnership with Janet Currie, as a co-director of Princeton's Center for Health and Wellbeing. Ho specializes in the medical care market and its industrial organization with an emphasis on health insurers and hospitals. Ho studies how price effects and the conditions of care provided by hospitals. She has received several awards for her academic research. Professor Ho is a frequent keynote speaker at conferences across the United States of America.
Melinda Jean Beeuwkes Buntin is an American health economist and a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. Previously, she was the Mike Curb Chair for Health Policy at Vanderbilt University, having served as a deputy assistant director for Health at the Congressional Budget Office.
