Health Care Economics

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.

Author 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.