Sustainable Health Economics and Financing

Dear Colleagues,

We increasingly understand the scale of the challenge to human health posed by climate change and other encroaching planetary boundaries. There is growing pressure in many countries for healthcare systems to take action to reduce their environmental impacts and carbon footprints. The economic and fiscal shock caused by COVID-19 has provided further impetus to growing skepticism about the sustainability of “business-as-usual” models of growth-based, neoliberal economics. Yet health economists and health financing scholars have been largely silent on these challenges and their implications for the economics and financing of healthcare systems. This Special Issue seeks primary research and original scholarly submissions that will advance our understanding of the economics and financing of environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable healthcare systems and can demonstrate how the disciplines of health economics and financing can contribute to sustainability goals. We particularly seek contributions that consider low- and middle-income countries, as well as health systems in high-income nations. Areas of interest include the following:

• How can healthcare financing mechanisms promote and support sustainable or “net-zero” healthcare in countries of all income levels?
• How can environmental impacts and environmental sustainability be effectively incorporated into the economic evaluation and health technology assessment?
• What are the implications of alternative economic paradigms for healthcare financing, for example, “green growth”, steady-state economics, wellbeing economics, degrowth, modern monetary theory, etc.?
• The economics of caring and the decommodification of healthcare in a post-growth world
• How can progress towards sustainable financing of Universal Health Coverage and SDG 3 be maintained and accelerated in the macroeconomic aftermath of COVID-19?
• How does health economics as a discipline need to change to address the challenges of environmental sustainability in health and healthcare (e.g., health economics methods, research priorities, pedagogy, curricula, funding, incentives, institutions)
• Why have health economists been slow to engage with the emerging sustainable healthcare movement?

Assoc. Prof. Martin Hensher
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• healthcare finance
• healthcare carbon footprint
• socially sustainable healthcare