Health economics and health policy

Abstract

This book examines the main issues in Australian health policy from an economic perspective and explains the relevance of economic thinking to decision-making in health care. Its general focus is on public policy choices at an aggregate level, about the allocation of scarce resources between a multitude of competing ends, inside and outside the health care sector. These decision-making processes, however, cannot realistically be divorced from the underlying value systems and ethical imperatives embedded in clinical decision-making at the grassroots level of health care. Health economics as a subdiscipline of economics is relatively young, its origins more or less coinciding with the growth in health care costs to a level at which they became burdensome. That general practitioners are paid fee-for-service seems so ingrained in Australian health policy as to be now almost immutable. The basis of evidence-based medicine is that both clinical medicine and health policy should draw on good evidence.