Money and Medicine

In Money and Medicine, Thomas E. Getzen provides a unified narrative of medical spending from ancient Egypt and Babylonia to the present day. Drawing on a historical reports, documents, and data, spanning millennia Getzen concentrates on a single indicator-the share of income devoted to medical care-to illustrate the growth of expenditures over time and across countries. In doing so, he explains inertial responses to the 2008 financial crisis and 2020 Covid recession while providing a forecasting model for trends over the next fifty years.