Risky Business: Why Insurance Markets Fail and What to Do About It
by Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Ray Fisman · Yale University Press
Non-technical account of adverse selection by two leading insurance economists. It uses health, life and other insurance examples to explain why private insurance markets unravel and evaluates policy responses such as mandates, subsidies and public provision. Gives the insurance-markets outcome more depth than any intro text, from the researchers who defined the field, while staying readable.
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More resources on Health Economics
A Health Podyssey
Weekly podcast from the journal Health Affairs featuring authors of recent health policy research. Conversations cover Medicare and Medicaid, insurance coverage, drug pricing, care delivery and health equity, showing how researchers frame their questions and what their findings imply for policy.
Methods for the Economic Evaluation of Health Care Programmes (4th ed.)
Standard reference on cost-effectiveness and cost-utility analysis. It covers the principles of economic evaluation, measuring costs and QALYs, decision-analytic modelling, synthesizing evidence, characterizing uncertainty and using results in resource-allocation decisions such as health technology assessment.
The Economics of Health Care Delivery
Four-module University of Pennsylvania course, about 8 hours. It covers the structure of US health care financing, the economics of insurance (risk aversion, moral hazard, adverse selection), how hospitals and physicians are paid and respond to incentives, and integration and antitrust. The strongest free structured course found for the insurance and incentives parts of the topic. US-centric, so paired with the Commonwealth Fund profiles for the comparison of national systems.
Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care (Arrow, 1963)
The 1963 American Economic Review paper that founded health economics. It explains why medical care differs from ordinary markets: uncertain illness and treatment, information gaps between doctor and patient, moral hazard, and the resulting nonmarket institutions. This copy is the free 2004 WHO Bulletin reprint.
Better Health Economics: An Introduction for Everyone
Introductory text by two research health economists, organized around demand (insurance, moral hazard, the uninsured), supply (physician payment, provider incentives, consolidation, pharmaceuticals) and social determinants of health, with each topic tied to recent empirical studies. The most current evidence-based introduction to the field. It covers insurance markets and health-system incentives without needing graduate math, which makes it the backbone text for this topic.