This chapter provides an overview of normative analysis in the health sector in recent decades. It surveys two distinct, but related, literatures. The first is normative analysis of the operation of health care and health care insurance markets, market failure, and the scope for non-market institutional arrangements to improve the efficiency and equity of the financing, funding, organization and delivery of health care. The second is the debate about the most appropriate normative framework within which to carry out normative analysis in the health sector, focusing on the welfarist and extra-welfarist frameworks. This is a debate about assumptions and methods. Although the rival frameworks share the broad conclusion that market failure pervades the health sector, the diagnoses regarding nature of that failure sometimes differ and, more importantly, the prescriptions to improve efficiency and equity often differ. Because it is not always clear what writers mean by "welfare economics" and "extra-welfarism," I briefly summarize key concepts of efficiency and key assumptions and elements of each framework. The three subsequent sections then analyze the nature of health care as an economic commodity and the implications of these characteristics both for the operation of health care and health care insurance markets and for the methods of normative economic analysis. Section 4 surveys prominent approaches to analyzing equity in health care. Section 5 examines the methods of normative analysis as applied to evaluate individual health care services. Finally, I end with some observations on recent discussions of the role of normative economic analysis in policy making and of health economists as policy advisors.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Publisher Info
Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
(with abstract),
plain text
(with abstract),
BibTeX,
RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite),
ReDIF This chapter was published in: A. J. Culyer & J. P. Newhouse (ed.) Handbook of Health Economics, , chapter 02, pages 55-118, 2000.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Heidi Boesdal).
Related research
This chapter was published in the following book, which is listed on IDEAS: A. J. Culyer & J. P. Newhouse (ed.), 2000.
"Handbook of Health Economics,"
Handbook of Health Economics,
Elsevier,
edition 1, volume 1, number 1, September.
[Downloadable!] (restricted) Keywords:
Find related papers by JEL classification: I1 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)