Politics, Not Economics, Ultimately Drives Inequality

Medical Economics (and Politics)

G et ready! The landscape in medicine is probably going to change rapidly. The starting bell rang in December 2010 in Washington, DC, with very little fanfare when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned doctors from prescribing Avastin to patients with advanced-stage breast cancer. 1 Avastin, a potent but costly drug, has worked in some clinical trials by halting the spread of cancer and...

Constitutional Economics/Constitutional Politics

Why does the treatment of American constitutional politics presented in We the People depart so radically from models of constitutional deliberation developed in the type of constitutional economics pioneered by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock? The paper defines three premises that account for the divergence, and concludes by proposing an inquiry into constitutional design that requires insig...

Economics and Politics

What Drives Tort Reform Legislation? Economics and Politics of the State Decisions to Restrict Liability Torts1

This paper studies driving factors behind the timing of state-level tort reform enactments between 1971 and 2005. Using discrete time hazard models, we find the level of litigation activity, as measured by incurred liability insurance losses and premiums, number of lawyers at the state level, and tort cases commenced at the state level and national level, to be the most important and robust det...

Human rights and health systems development: confronting the politics of exclusion and the economics of inequality.

The social movements of the last two decades have fostered a rights-based approach to health systems development within the global discourse on national and international health governance. In this piece, we discuss ongoing challenges in the cavernous "implementation gap": translating legislative human rights victories into actual practice and delivery. Using accompaniment as an underlying prin...