Who Gets Care? The Economics of Healthcare in the U.S. and U.K.

Every healthcare system faces the same fundamental challenge: how do you decide who gets care, when they get it, and what it should cost?

In the U.K., access is often constrained by time. In the U.S., it’s more often constrained by price. But the reality on both sides of the Atlantic is more complicated, and the tradeoffs may be more similar than we think.

Drawing on his research and Stern’s Healthcare Markets course, Professor Michael Dickstein will explore the economics behind some of healthcare’s biggest challenges, from rising costs and surgical wait times to the surprising ways doctors make decisions about prescription drugs. He’ll examine what two recent studies reveal about the hidden costs of waiting and paying for care, and what the NHS and the U.S. healthcare system might learn from one another.

The conversation will also look ahead to one of the biggest forces reshaping healthcare today: the rapid rise of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs and what their enormous demand could mean for healthcare costs, access, and policy in both the U.K. and U.S.

Agenda:

6:00 – 6:30 PM  Arrival, welcome drinks
6:30 – 7:30 PM  Presentation and Q&A
7:30 – 8:15 PM  Reception

Speaker Bio:

Michael Dickstein is an Associate Professor of Economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business and Director of Stern’s Healthcare Initiative.

Professor Dickstein’s research interests lie at the intersection of industrial organization and health economics. In recent papers, he has explored how patient prices influence prescription drug adoption and how re-defining the boundaries of a health insurance pool may lead to greater enrollment. A through-line of his work is to build modeling tools to capture the complex economic features of healthcare markets, including uncertain product quality, adverse selection, and imperfect competition.

Professor Dickstein teaches the “Healthcare Markets” course in Stern’s MBA program, as well as a health economics elective in the undergraduate program. For his teaching, he received recognition as a “Best 40-under-40 MBA professor” by Poets and Quants in 2021.

Prior to joining NYU Stern in 2015, Professor Dickstein was an assistant professor of economics at Stanford University and a postdoctoral associate at the Cowles Foundation at Yale University.

He received his B.S. in Applied Economics from Cornell University and his Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University.