Discounting Life


Book Description

Demonstrates necropolitical law's cultural disseminations to show how, for Americans and the world, life is discounted, undermining rule of law.




Discounting Life


Book Description

Extrajudicial, extraterritorial killings of War on Terror adversaries by the US state have become the new normal. Alongside targeted individuals, unnamed and uncounted others are maimed and killed. Despite the absence of law's conventional sites, processes, and actors, the US state celebrates these killings as the realization of 'justice.' Meanwhile, images, narrative, and affect do the work of law; authorizing and legitimizing the discounting of some lives so that others – implicitly, American nationals – may live. How then, as we live through this unending, globalized war, are we to make sense of law in relation to the valuing of life? Adopting an interdisciplinary approach to law to excavate the workings of necropolitical law, and interrogating the US state's justifications for the project of counterterror, this book's temporal arc, the long War on Terror, illuminates the profound continuities and many guises for racialized, imperial violence informing the contemporary discounting of life.




Identified versus Statistical Lives


Book Description

The identified lives effect describes the fact that people demonstrate a stronger inclination to assist persons and groups identified as at high risk of great harm than those who will or already suffer similar harm, but endure unidentified. As a result of this effect, we allocate resources reactively rather than proactively, prioritizing treatment over prevention. For example, during the August 2010 gold mine cave-in in Chile, where ten to twenty million dollars was spent by the Chilean government to rescue the 33 miners trapped underground. Rather than address the many, more cost effective mine safety measures that should have been implemented, the Chilean government and international donors concentrated efforts in large-scale missions that concerned only the specific group. Such bias as illustrated through this incident raises practical and ethical questions that extend to almost every aspect of human life and politics. What can social and cognitive sciences teach us about the origin and triggers of the effect? Philosophically and ethically, is the effect a "bias" to be eliminated or is it morally justified? What implications does the effect have for health care, law, the environment and other practice domains? This volume is the first to take an interdisciplinary approach toward answering this issue of identified versus statistical lives by considering a variety of perspectives from psychology, public health, law, ethics, and public policy.




Good Society


Book Description

THE GOOD SOCIETY examines how many of our institutions- from the family to the government itself- fell from grace, and offers concrete proposals for revitalizing them.




Meta-Analysis, Decision Analysis, and Cost-Effectiveness Analysis


Book Description

Meta-analysis, decision analysis, and cost-effectiveness analysis are the cornerstones of evidence-based medicine. These related quantitative methods have become essential tools in the formulation of clinical and public policy based on the synthesis of evidence. All three methods are taught with increasing frequency in medical schools and schools of public health and in health policy courses at the undergraduate and graduate level. This book is a lucid introduction, and will serve the needs of students taking introductory courses that cover these topics. It will also be useful to clinicians and policymakers who need to understand the quantitative underpinnings of the methods in order to best apply the information that derives from them. The second edition of this popular book adds new material on cumulative meta-analysis as a method to explore heterogeneity. The coverage of cost-effectiveness analysis has been brought into close alignment with recommendations of the U.S. Public Health Panel on Cost-Effectiveness Analysis in Health and Medicine. Many of the examples have been replaced with more current examples, and all of the material has been updated to reflect recent advances in the methods and the emergence of consensus about some previously controversial issues. analysis. These three closely related methods have become even more important for synthesizing research since the first edition was published in 1994. And they have gained legitimacy as tools for guiding health policy.




Health Economics


Book Description

Comprehensive in coverage this textbook, written by academics from leading institutions, discusses current developments and debates in modern health economics from an international perspective. Economic models are presented in detail, complemented by real-life explanations and analysis, and discussions of the influence of such theories on policymaking. Offering sound pedagogy and economic rigor, Health Economics focuses on building intuition alongside appropriate mathematical formality, translating technical language into accessible economic narrative. Rather than shying away from intellectual building blocks, students are introduced to technical and theoretical foundations and encouraged to apply these to inform empirical studies and wider policymaking. Health Economics provides: - A broad scope, featuring comparative health policy and empirical examples from around the world to help students relate the principles of health economics to everyday life - Coverage of topical issues such as the obesity epidemic, economic epidemiology, socioeconomic health disparities, and behavioural economics - A rich learning resource, complete with hundreds of exercises to help solidify and extend understanding. This book is designed for advanced undergraduate courses in health economics and policy but may also interest postgraduate students in economics, medicine and health policy. Accompanying online resources for this title can be found at bloomsburyonlineresources.com/health-economics. These resources are designed to support teaching and learning when using this textbook and are available at no extra cost.




When Breath Becomes Air


Book Description

**THE MILLION COPY BESTSELLER** 'Rattling. Heartbreaking. Beautiful,' Atul Gawande, bestselling author of Being Mortal What makes life worth living in the face of death? At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, the next he was a patient struggling to live. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi's transformation from a medical student asking what makes a virtuous and meaningful life into a neurosurgeon working in the core of human identity - the brain - and finally into a patient and a new father. Paul Kalanithi died while working on this profoundly moving book, yet his words live on as a guide to us all. When Breath Becomes Air is a life-affirming reflection on facing our mortality and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a gifted writer who became both. 'A vital book about dying. Awe-inspiring and exquisite. Obligatory reading for the living' Nigella Lawson




Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine


Book Description

A COMPLETE UPDATE AND REVISION OF THE CLASSIC TEXT "At last, a manual of operations for comparing the cost-effectiveness of a preventive service with a treatment intervention." --American Journal of Preventive Medicine Twenty years after the first edition of COST-EFFECTIVENESS IN HEALTH AND MEDICINE established the practical benchmark for cost-effectiveness analysis, this completely revised edition of the classic text provides an essential resource to a new generation of practitioners, students, researchers, and policymakers. Produced by the Second Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine--a team of 13 experts from fields including decision science, economics, ethics, psychology, and medicine--this new edition is a comprehensive guide to the use of cost-effectiveness analysis as an evaluative tool at the institutional and policy levels. As health care systems face increasing pressure to derive maximum value from expenditures, the guidelines in this new text represent not just the best information available, but a vital guide to health care decision-making in a challenging new era. Completely revised and enriched with examples and expanded coverage, this second edition of COST-EFFECTIVENESS IN HEALTH AND MEDICINE builds on its predecessor's excellence, offering required reading for both analysts and decision makers.




Strategic Petroleum Reserve Issues


Book Description