Better Health Economics: An Introduction for Everyone

"A health-economics textbook for the rest of us. The economics of healthcare are messy. For most consumers, there's minimal control around costs or services. Sometimes doctors get paid a lot; other times they don't get paid at all. Insurance and drug companies are bad, except when they're good. Everyone still uses fax machines. If economics is the study of markets and efficiency, how do we make sense of any of this? Better Health Economics is an warts-and-all introduction to a field that is, economically speaking, more exceptions than rules. Drawing on combined decades of teaching, MIT-trained economists Tal Gross and Matthew J. Notowidigdo offer readers an accessible, nonexpert primer on the field's essential concepts-and, critically, a framework for thinking about this increasingly imperfect (and important!) market. Written in warm, spare prose and with a minimum of theory or math, Better Health Economics is an ideal entry point in health economics for the range of fields for which the topic is essential. By understanding health economics as an ongoing effort to retain good things while eliminating wasteful things, students from social science, medicine, and public policy will draw a richer and more scalable understanding of concepts that are traditionally opaque, even daunting. Better Health Economics is a love letter to a topic that is traditionally unloveable. Healthcare may be a failed market, but it's our failed market"--