The analytical approach of standard health economics has so far failed to sufficiently account for the nature of care. This has important ramifications for the analysis and valuation of care, and therefore for the pattern of health and medical care provision. This book sets out an alternative approach, which places care at the center of an economics of health, showing how essential it is that care is appropriately recognized in policy as a means of enhancing the dignity of the individual.
Whereas traditional health economics has tended to eschew value issues, this book embraces them, introducing care as a normative element at the center of theoretical analysis. Drawing upon care theory from feminist works, philosophy, nursing and medicine, and political economy, the authors develop a health care economics with a moral basis in health care systems. In providing deeper insights into the nature of care and caring, this book seeks to redress the shortcomings of the standard approach and contribute to the development of a more person-based approach to health and medical care in economics.
Health Care Economics will be of interest to researchers and postgraduate students in health economics, heterodox economists, and those interested in health and medical care.
List of illustrations
Foreword
Preface and acknowledgements
Chapter 1 – Health care economics
1.1 Introduction: mainstream ‘health’ care economics?
1.2 The microeconomics of health care markets: principal–agent theory, moral hazard, and care
1.3 Care as a market externality: caring externalities
1.4 The problematic nature of caring externalities
1.5 Care and the socially embedded individual
1.6 An alternative health economics
1.7 Outline of the argument of the book
Part I – Health care notions: health economics and the biomedical approach
Chapter 2 – Health care, medical care, and the biomedical bpproach
2.1 Introduction: health care and medical care
2.2 Medical care: the biomedical approach
2.3 Health economics and the biomedical approach
2.4 The biomedical approach to medical care: issues and concerns
2.5 Delineating medical care and health care
Chapter 3 – On identifying and categorizing health and medical care
3.1 Introduction
3.2 The array and types of health care
3.3 Delivery levels of medical care
3.4 Medical (and health) care as distinctive measures
3.5 Some concluding thoughts
Part II – Theories of care: towards health and medical care
Chapter 4 – Economics and care
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Care in "early" economic thought
4.3 Kenneth Boulding: health economist?
4.4 Gavin Mooney on health care: from community ties to participation to reciprocity
4.5 Caring labor as a characteristic human activity: feminist economics
Chapter 5 – Capturing care
5.1 Introduction
5.2 An overarching definition of care?
5.3 Care of the self
5.4 The aims of care
5.5 Phases and types of care
5.6 Some final thoughts
Part III – Care systems, human flourishing, and policy
Chapter 6 – Institutions, groups, and the morality of care
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Institutions and institutional economics
6.3 Health and medical care institutions: medical pluralism and the three sectors of health care
6.4 Moral groups of care
6.5 Medical groups of care
Chapter 7 – Developing capabilities and the dignity of the individual
7.1 Introduction
7.2 Health capabilities and their social embeddeness in care relationships
7.3 The values of socially embedded health capabilities
7.4 The nature of the person as a focus of care in socially embedded care relationships
Chapter 8 – Social values in health care systems
8.1 Introduction
8.2 Public health and the social causes of inequalities in health
8.3 Public health and health capability improvement
8.4 The normative objectives of health care systems
8.5 The institutional and normative foundations of health care
Chapter 9 –Towards dignity in comprehensive health caring
9.1 The polarity in conceptions of care
9.2 The importance of dignity
9.3 Health policy for today and the future
9.4 Whither economics?
Index
Biography
John B. Davis is Professor of Economics at Marquette University, USA, and Professor of Economics at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He is co-editor of the Journal of Economic Methodology. He is author of Individuals and Identity in Economics (2011), The Theory of the Individual in Economics (2003), and Keynes’s Philosophical Development (1994).
Robert McMaster is Professor of Political Economy in the Adam Smith Business School at the University of Glasgow, UK. He was a co-editor of the Review of Social Economy from 2005 to 2016. He has published numerous academic articles and is a co-editor of the four-volume Social Economics collection in the Routledge series on Critical Concepts in Economics.
‘At least in developed economies, the amount of resources devoted to health care is massive and growing. John B. Davis and Robert McMaster argue further that health care poses a major challenge to standard assumptions in mainstream economic analysis. They emphasise that the individual does not stand alone, and is embedded in a web of social relations, invoking varied and complex motivations. The impact of this challenging and well-argued book should spread well beyond health care economics alone.’ — Geoffrey M Hodgson, Research Professor in Business Studies, University of Hertfordshire, UK
