Likely consequences of increased patient choice

Is Patient Choice the Future of Health Care Systems?

Patient and user choice are at the forefront of the debate on the future direction of health and public services provision in many industrialized countries in Europe and elsewhere. It is used both, as a means to achieve desired policy goals in public health care systems such as greater efficiency and improved quality of care, and as a good with its own intrinsic value. However, the evidence sug...

Anticipating Likely Consequences of Lottery-Based Affirmative Action

Objectives. To better understand the consequences of whole or partial reliance on test scores as a screening mechanism for college or university admissions or for job placement or promotion. Methods. We introduce a simple hurdles/threshold model to study one particular mechanism that has been recently proposed to generate a ‘‘compromise’’ between race-normed or gender-normed standards for accep...

Food Taxes: How Likely Are Likely Effects?

Patient Choice Has Become the Standard Practice in Healthcare Provision: It is Time to Extend its Meaning; Comment on “Is Patient Choice the Future of Health Care Systems?”

The key argument of this commentary is that patient choice has a broader meaning than suggested by consumerist choice models. In increasingly marketized health care systems with diversified and knowledge-based service arrangements, patients are continuously obliged to choose insurers, physicians or hospitals and treatments—whether they like it or not. However, health care users refer to a wide ...

Choice and the relative pleasure of consequences.

Although pleasure played a central role in early theories of decision making, it gradually became peripheral, largely because of measurement concerns. Normative theories became more mathematical, and descriptive theories emphasized cognition over emotion. In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in emotions and choice. This article examines attempts to model pleasure and pain in terms...