Health care is a highly complex, dynamic, and creative sector of the economy. While health economics has to continue its efforts to improve its methods and tools to better inform decisions, the application needs to be aligned with the insights and models of other social sciences disciplines. Decisions may be guided by four concept models based on ethical and distributive justice: libertarian, c...

International comparisons of horizontal inequity in health has recently become one of the most pertinent issues in health economics. However, no previous studies have been undertaken on Japan. This omission is rectified in this paper. Moreover, we consider the dynamics of horizontal inequity in health over six years from 1992 to 1998. These dynamics have never been considered in this field. In ...

In his article “Determination of VA Health Care Costs,” Barnett (2003 [this issue]) describes various methods available to estimate costs in the U.S. Veterans Affairs (VA) health care system. These methods include direct measurement, pseudo bills combining VA patient-level utilization data and non-VA cost lists, cost functions based on regression analysis using non-VA cost estimates, and averag...

After a review of recent developments in precision medicine, population health sciences and innovative clinical trial designs, and in health economics and policy, we show how innovations in health analytics can capitalize on the advances in biomedicine and health economics towards developing a data-driven and cost-effective 21st century health care system. In particular, we propose a mutually b...

It is argued here that an economics centred on subjective utility-maximization is unsuitable for the analysis and policy grounding of health care provision. To some extent, the peculiarities of health care have been recognized by mainstream health economists, who sometimes abandon Paretian welfare considerations to focus on needs instead. This article examines important peculiarities of health ...