Hicks (health management and informatics, U. of Missouri, Columbia) introduces public health students to the economic approach to understanding healthcare issues and problems, based on the identification of scarcity as a major cause of many problems. She focuses on how to think about economic problems in a systematic way and the three main economic tasks in a health context--descriptive, explanatory, and evaluative economics--and the medical care, health insurance, and the labor markets. This edition has more on health insurance to incorporate more theory on insurance markets and the implications that insurance has for efficiency in the industry, and new coverage of healthcare reform and its impact on different sectors of the economy and individuals in the system and other changes in health policy, such as the implications of the Health Information for Economics and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act. The glossary has been updated and expanded, and the text has more on Medicare to include Part C and Part D, the conversion of the original Diagnosis-Related Groups system, employer-based insurance, rationing, capitation and salaried physicians, the net-benefit approach and the benefit-cost ratio approach, normal and inferior goods, expectations, and substitution effects, and moral hazard, including Nyman's model. Annotation ©2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)