Warren Greenberg – författare

“Competition. Deregulation. Free market forces. The debate over competition in health care that raged in the 1970s brought with it a new economic jargon, a vocabulary of concepts and issues unheard of in hospitals a decade earlier.“Competition in health care has developed to a greater degree than most economists predicted ten years ago. That is the conclusion of Warren Greenberg in his introduction to Competition in the Health Care Sector: Ten Years Later, a retrospective of a 1977 Federal Trade Commission conference, which produced the landmark treatise Competition in the Health Care Sector: Past, Present, and Future. Seven of the ten original papers are reexamined; a chapter on the nursing home industry has been added.“As with the original volume, Greenberg predicts that the retrospective will become a critical element in the health care economic literature.”-Hospitals

This book is an economist's view of the health care marketplace. It exam­ ines the incentives of physicians, patients, firms and the role of government in the health care sector in a world of limited resources. Several themes run through this book. First, health care is a business. To an economist this means that firms maximize profits. Perhaps this is not always so, but I have yet to see a better theory of how health care firms behave. The health care industry, therefore, is not much different in eco­ nomic terms from other industries. At one time, economists pointed to the asymmetry of information between the physician provider and the patient as one difference between health care and other industries. Physicians often know a great deal about treating an illness while the patient knows little or nothing. But the movement toward managed care in the United States has partially closed the information gap (although perhaps creating other prob­ lems). Indeed, the advent of managed care has propelled health care into a business. Information is another theme of the book.