Major concepts of health care economics.

This article applies major economic concepts, such as supply, demand, monopoly, monopsony, adverse selection, and moral hazard, to central features of U.S. health care. These illustrations help explain some of the principal problems of health policy-high cost and the uninsured-and why solutions are difficult to obtain.

Restructuring medical education to meet current and future health care needs.

U.S. health care is changing, and it will continue to change across multiple dimensions: a different mix of patients; more ambulatory, chronic care and less acute, inpatient care; an older population; expanded insurance coverage; a team approach to care; rapid growth of subspecialty care; growing emphasis on cost-effective care; and rapid technological change. These changes demand a corresponding evolution in physician roles and training. However, despite innovation in content and teaching methods, there has been little alteration to the basic structure of medical education since the Flexner Report sparked widespread reform in 1910. Looking to the future, medical education might evolve to include preparation for a team approach to care via practical training for multispecialty collaborative practice and preparing physicians to be leaders of primary care teams that include nonphysician providers; shorter training for some physicians via flexible pathways and "fast tracks" at each phase of training; cost-effective care in clinical practice; increased training in geriatrics; and "on ramps" and "off ramps" along the physician career path for flexible training over a lifetime. Although the challenges facing the health care system are great, meeting changing health care needs must begin at the foundation, in medical education.

Geographic and racial variation in premature mortality in the U.S.: analyzing the disparities.

Life expectancy at birth, estimated from United States period life tables, has been shown to vary systematically and widely by region and race. We use the same tables to estimate the probability of survival from birth to age 70 (S(70)), a measure of mortality more sensitive to disparities and more reliably calculated for small populations, to describe the variation and identify its sources in greater detail to assess the patterns of this variation. Examination of the unadjusted probability of S(70) for each US county with a sufficient population of whites and blacks reveals large geographic differences for each race-sex group. For example, white males born in the ten percent healthiest counties have a 77 percent probability of survival to age 70, but only a 61 percent chance if born in the ten percent least healthy counties. Similar geographical disparities face white women and blacks of each sex. Moreover, within each county, large differences in S(70) prevail between blacks and whites, on average 17 percentage points for men and 12 percentage points for women. In linear regressions for each race-sex group, nearly all of the geographic variation is accounted for by a common set of 22 socio-economic and environmental variables, selected for previously suspected impact on mortality; R(2) ranges from 0.86 for white males to 0.72 for black females. Analysis of black-white survival chances within each county reveals that the same variables account for most of the race gap in S(70) as well. When actual white male values for each explanatory variable are substituted for black in the black male prediction equation to assess the role explanatory variables play in the black-white survival difference, residual black-white differences at the county level shrink markedly to a mean of -2.4% (+/-2.4); for women the mean difference is -3.7% (+/-2.3).