The Economic Attributes of Medical Care: Implications for Rationing Choices in the United States and United Kingdom

1996 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 546-558 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dwayne A. Banks

The healthcare systems of the United States and United Kingdom are vastly different. The former relies primarily on private sector incentives and market forces to allocate medical care services, while the latter is a centrally planned system funded almost entirely by the public sector. Therefore, each nation represents divergent views on the relative efficacy of the market or government in achieving social objectives in the area of medical care policy. Since its inception in 1948, the National Health Services (NHS) of the United Kingdom has consistently emphasized equity in the allocation of medical services. It has done so by creating a system whereby services are universally free of charge at the point of entry. Conversely, the United States has relied upon the evolution of a perplexing array of public and private sector insurance schemes centered more around consumer choice than equity in allocation.

Fisheries ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 169-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth F. Kurzawski ◽  
William L. Fisher ◽  
Dirk Miller ◽  
James M. Long

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 601-621 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lila Flavin ◽  
Leah Zallman ◽  
Danny McCormick ◽  
J. Wesley Boyd

In health care policy debates, discussion centers around the often-misperceived costs of providing medical care to immigrants. This review seeks to compare health care expenditures of U.S. immigrants to those of U.S.-born individuals and evaluate the role which immigrants play in the rising cost of health care. We systematically examined all post-2000, peer-reviewed studies in PubMed related to health care expenditures by immigrants written in English in the United States. The reviewers extracted data independently using a standardized approach. Immigrants’ overall expenditures were one-half to two-thirds those of U.S.-born individuals, across all assessed age groups, regardless of immigration status. Per capita expenditures from private and public insurance sources were lower for immigrants, particularly expenditures for undocumented immigrants. Immigrant individuals made larger out-of-pocket health care payments compared to U.S.-born individuals. Overall, immigrants almost certainly paid more toward medical expenses than they withdrew, providing a low-risk pool that subsidized the public and private health insurance markets. We conclude that insurance and medical care should be made more available to immigrants rather than less so.


1988 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 63-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard B Freeman

The institutional structure of the American labor market changed remarkably from the 1950s and 1960s to the 1980s. What explains the decline in union representation of private wage and salary workers? Why have unions expanded in the public sector while contracting in the private sector? Is the economy-wide fall in density a phenomenon common to developed capitalist economies, or is it unique to the United States? To what extent should economists alter their views about what unions do to the economy in light of the fact that they increasingly do it in the public sector? To answer these questions I examine a wide variety of evidence on the union status of public and private workers. I contrast trends in unionization in the United States with trends in other developed countries, particularly Canada, and use these contrasts and the divergence between unions in the public and private sectors of the United States to evaluate proposed explanations.


2007 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 28-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Dilling

Public and private sector actors increasingly recognize the need for action to address climate change. With the introduction of “carbon sinks” into the policy dialogue, the notion of managing human activities to mitigate climate change has extended beyond energy systems and emissions of carbon dioxide to include management of the carbon cycle itself, through manipulation of the terrestrial and oceanic realms. The number of decision makers involved and scope of managing the carbon cycle deliberately for climate purposes raises enormous challenges to governance including identifying appropriate mechanisms where they do not yet exist and adding additional criteria onto existing mechanisms that are already affecting the carbon cycle. In this paper, I define effective carbon governance as limiting the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This paper outlines a number of challenges to effective carbon governance at multiple scales using the example of land use in the United States and elsewhere.


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