Evidence: Its Meanings in Health Care and in Law examines the ways in which scientists, clinical practitioners, judges, legal scholars, and juries interpret and use evidence. The articles find that the concept and attributes of "evidence" depend on where one sits. They recognize the time-honored legal and medical science interpretation and operationalization of "evidence" while, at the same time, acknowledging that the health care system and the legal system would each benefit by sustained efforts of mutual education of practitioners in both fields. 

When federal and state policy makers’ efforts to enact sweeping health care reform in the mid-1990s ended in stalemate, the private sector unleashed initiatives that have affected virtually every aspect of health care. With updated essays first published in issues of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, Healthy Markets? offers the most comprehensive and critical examination yet found in a single volume of the economic, political, and social implications of this recent market transformation of health care in the United States.
With original contributions from leading social science health policy analysts, this volume addresses the full context of health system change. Believing that the analysis of health care change is too important to be left to economists alone, Mark A. Peterson has collected a mulitdisciplinary group of experts who revisit the contentious debate over the market approaches to health care and consider the disparate effects of these approaches on cost, quality, and coverage of both managed care and Medicaid and Medicare. While market enthusiasts applaud the enhanced efficiency, reduced excess capacity, and abatement of the decades-long health care cost explosion, a backlash has emerged among many providers and the public against the perceived excesses of the market: diminished access to care, commercialization of the physician-patient relationship, and exacerbated inequality. Contributors assess these varied responses while examining the impact that market-based applications are likely to have for future health policy making, the significance of the U.S. experience for policy makers abroad, and the lessons that these changes might provide for thinking sensibly about the future of our health care system.
This volume will be useful for public policy analysts, economists, social scientists, health care providers and administrators, and others interested in the future—and in understanding the past—of American health care.

Contributors. Gary S. Belkin, Lawrence D. Brown, Robert G. Evans, Martin Gaynor, Paul B. Ginsburg, Marsha Gold, Theodore R. Marmor, Cathie Jo Martin, Jonathan B. Oberlander, Mark V. Pauly, Mark A. Peterson, Thomas Rice, Deborah A. Stone, William B. Vogt, Kenneth E. Thorpe

This special issue of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law centers on Nobel laureate Kenneth J. Arrow’s seminal article "Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care." When the essay first appeared in 1963, health economics did not exist as an established field, and there was a professional and social bias against thinking about health care in economic terms. Arrow’s trailblazing article laid the foundation for modern health economics and has guided its direction for four decades.

Now the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law examines this legacy, opening with a foreword by Mark V. Pauly, one of the first to publish a response to Arrow’s original article and a major voice in health economics today. A reprint of the article itself serves as a springboard from which contributors assess the accuracy of Arrow’s portrayal of the United States health care system in the early sixties and evaluate how the system has progressed since that time. The contributors to this remarkable collection include some of the most distinguished scholars in the health policy field.

Designed to be an effective reference tool, this issue sets Arrow’s original article apart from the rest by printing it on tinted paper. The contributors’ responses to Arrow are divided into four parts—Part 1: Supply, Demand, and Health Care Competition; Part 2: Risk, Insurance, and Redistribution; Part 3: Information, Knowledge, and Medical Markets; Part 4: Social Norms and Professionalism.

At a time when Medicare stands at the forefront of national politics, Medicare: Intentions, Effects, and Politics moves past the political rhetoric of the moment to provide a groundwork for informed debate. This special issue of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law offers a historically-based exploration and understanding of Medicare as well as needed perspectives for intelligent reform.
A complete understanding of the particular and peculiar structure of Medicare can be gained only by considering the ideas, politics, and institutions of the 1960s that shaped it. With this historical perspective, the articles in this collection can move beyond partisan arguments and politically motivated reform proposals. Instead, they outline educated guidelines for improving Medicare and debunk commonly held but false assumptions about the program. In "How Not to Think about Medicare" the field’s most noted scholar, Theodore Marmor, exposes four such misconceptions, including the program’s seeming inability to control costs and ward off what some call a fiscal tsunami—the aging of the baby boomers. Other contributions address frequently overlooked functions of Medicare. While the program is known for its universal health coverage for the elderly and the disabled, for instance, Medicare also serves a crucial role in overseeing hospital performance and furthering health education. This special issue concludes with a discussion of Marmor’s recently revised classic book, The Politics of Medicare, by five leading specialists who interpret the present Medicare program in light of its original construct and current political influences.

Contributors. Michael Gusmano, Jacob Hacker, Nancy M. Kane, Stephen A. Magnus, Theodore Marmor, Jonathan Oberlander, Eric M. Patashnik, Mark A. Peterson, Mark J. Schlesinger, Carolyn Tuohy, Bruce Vladeck, Julian Zelizer

This volume revisits the Nobel Prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow’s classic 1963 essay “Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care” in light of the many changes in American health care since its publication. Arrow’s groundbreaking piece, reprinted in full here, argued that while medicine was subject to the same models of competition and profit maximization as other industries, concepts of trust and morals also played key roles in understanding medicine as an economic institution and in balancing the asymmetrical relationship between medical providers and their patients. His conclusions about the medical profession’s failures to “insure against uncertainties” helped initiate the reevaluation of insurance as a public and private good.

Coming from diverse backgrounds—economics, law, political science, and the health care industry itself—the contributors use Arrow’s article to address a range of present-day health-policy questions. They examine everything from health insurance and technological innovation to the roles of charity, nonprofit institutions, and self-regulation in addressing medical needs. The collection concludes with a new essay by Arrow, in which he reflects on the health care markets of the new millennium. At a time when medical costs continue to rise, the ranks of the uninsured grow, and uncertainty reigns even among those with health insurance, this volume looks back at a seminal work of scholarship to provide critical guidance for the years ahead.

Contributors
Linda H. Aiken
Kenneth J. Arrow
Gloria J. Bazzoli
M. Gregg Bloche
Lawrence Casalino
Michael Chernew
Richard A. Cooper
Victor R. Fuchs
Annetine C. Gelijns
Sherry A. Glied
Deborah Haas-Wilson
Mark A. Hall
Peter J. Hammer
Clark C. Havighurst
Peter D. Jacobson
Richard Kronick
Michael L. Millenson
Jack Needleman
Richard R. Nelson
Mark V. Pauly
Mark A. Peterson
Uwe E. Reinhardt
James C. Robinson
William M. Sage
J. B. Silvers
Frank A. Sloan
Joshua Graff Zivin