Clouded Thinking

Abstract

Rising health care costs are of concern to policymakers, employers, health care leaders, patients, and citizens all over the world. Health care decision makers struggle to satisfy the increasing demands for health care services associated with aging populations, increasing health care technologies, and changing population expectations using the resources available to the health care system. Notwithstanding, improvements in the level of health of the populations and increasing productivity of health care providers, there appears to be a continuous call for health care systems to do more and to do better. The economics discipline has been identified as providing relevant “toolbox” for dealing with these challenges and there is now over a quarter century of experience of applying an economics way of thinking as an input to health care decision processes. Until recently, this application occurred in an opportunistic, or at least nonsystematic way, within health care systems. In recent years there have been movements in both academic and policymaking environments to promote more systematic and standardized approaches to the use of economics as an input to decision making about the investment in health care programs.