Both developing and developed countries face an increasing mismatch between what patients expect to receive from healthcare and what the public healthcare systems can afford to provide. Where there has been a growing recognition of the entitlement to receive healthcare, the frustrated expectations with regards to the level of provision has led to lawsuits challenging the denial of funding for health treatments by public health systems. This book analyses the impact of courts and litigation on the way health systems set priorities and make rationing decisions. In particular, it focuses on how the judicial protection of the right to healthcare can impact the institutionalization, functioning and centrality of Health Technology Assessment (HTA) for decisions about the funding of treatment. Based on the case study of three jurisdictions – Brazil, Colombia, and England – it shows that courts can be a key driver for the institutionalization of HTA. These case studies show the paradoxes of judicial control, which can promote accountability and impair it, demand administrative competence and undermine bureaucratic capacities. The case studies offer a nuanced and evidence-informed understanding of these paradoxes in the context of health care by showing how the judicial control of priority-setting decisions in health care can be used to require and control an explicit scheme for health technology assessment, but can also limit and circumvent it. It will be essential for those researching Medical Law and Healthcare Policy, Human Rights Law, and Social Rights.

This book offers a glimpse into the future. The companies it describes are pioneers, the first-movers in market shifts that will eventually become mainstream. These hybrid organizations or what others call values-driven or mission-driven organizations operate in the blurry space between the for-profit and non-profit worlds. They are redefining their supply chains, their sources of capital, their very purpose for being; and in the process they are changing the market for others."

From the way the Iragi rebuilding effort is carried out, it is clear that Westerners in general, and Americans in particular, do not understand Asians at all. Building hospitals and schools will not win hearts and minds in Iraq. From East Asia to South Asia to West Asia, the only way to establish peace and order, and subsequently win people over, is by coercion, or more precisely coercive persuasion. American approach to the Iraq effort has so far followed the post war German model instead of the Japanese model, ignoring the fundamental cultural difference between East and West. This book lays out that difference in no uncertain terms, by tracing the evolution of the Asian mind from its ancient beginning to the present. Though the focus of the book is on East Asia, the basic psychology of all Asians is similar, as their child rearing practices serve the same purpose, and the mental disposition is formed well before the child comes of age. There is no better place to investigate that mental process than the Confucian civilization, for in no other culture on earth has the evolution of the human psyche been better documented and given more emphasis. To understand the East, or simply to understand humanity, The Confucian Mind is a must read.