Background: Concerns about rising health care costs require rigorous economic study to inform clinical and policy decision-making. Micro-costing is a cost estimation methodology employing detailed resource utilization and unit cost data to generate precise estimates of economic costs....

Kenneth Arrow’s seminal 1963 article “Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care,” published in the American Economic Review, is widely regarded as the origin of health economics. The health economics field that has emerged in the subsequent 50 years has become a collection of...

In 2005 the Global Health Council convened healthcare providers, community organizers, policymakers and researchers at Health Systems: Putting Pieces Together to discuss health from a systems perspective. Its report and others have established healthcare access and quality as two of the most...

The years 2003-2004 marked the tenth anniversary of the rapid rise and demise of the Clinton administration's health reform efforts. Health reform may again be a political issue in the 2008 congressional and presidential elections. However, analysts still disagree over why large-scale health...

The uncertainty of health need, catastrophic costs of medical care, and risk-averse nature of individuals place risk pooling at the center of health-care financing. For a variety of reasons, however, many health systems in low- and middle-income countries do not take advantage of risk pooling....