Accounting and the ‘Insoluble’ Problem of Health-Care Costs
Florian Gebreiter and
Laurence Ferry
European Accounting Review, 2016, vol. 25, issue 4, 719-733
Abstract:
Health service accounting reforms are frequently promoted, explained or justified with reference to aging populations, expensive medical technologies and their purported implications for the cost of health care. Drawing on Foucault’s genealogical method, we examine the emergence of concerns regarding health expenditure in the wake of the creation of the British National Health Service in 1948, and their relationship with health service accounting practices. We argue that concerns regarding the cost of health care are historically contingent rather than inescapable consequences of demographic and technological change, and that health service accounting practices are both constitutive and reflective of such concerns. We conclude by relating our analysis to current attempts to control costs and increase efficiency in the health services.
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09638180.2016.1187073 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:euract:v:25:y:2016:i:4:p:719-733
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/REAR20
DOI: 10.1080/09638180.2016.1187073
Access Statistics for this article
European Accounting Review is currently edited by Laurence van Lent
More articles in European Accounting Review from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().