A new book, Human Services and Long-term Care: A Market Model, written by Yoshihiko Kadoya, the Director of Hiroshima Institute of Health Economics (HIHER), Hiroshima University, has just been published.

Focusing on striking a balance between human services’ need for quality assurance and market providers’ need for profit, this book is not a summary of existing economic research on the long-term care market. Rather, it makes the point that there is no existing market model that is suitable to solve the problems in the human services market, including the long-term care market. In addition, this book proposes a mechanism suitable for ensuring both efficiency and quality, which has long been a problem in the human services market, from an interdisciplinary point of view as well as an economic perspective.

In summary, this book aims to transition from a model in which existing prices and quality are the selection factors for long-term care services, to a model that excludes price and in which quality alone is the selection factor. In the conventional model in which price and quality are the selection factors, a wide range of goods is created, from those that are “high quality but expensive” to those that are “low quality but inexpensive.” This “market image” is not a problem in the case of general goods, such as daily necessities, but it is not suitable for a market like human services, in which poor quality services can significantly lower the user’s quality of life. This is because while the market image is not a problem for the wealthy, the economically vulnerable can find their quality of life significantly lowered by the long-term care they receive, which contradicts the original spirit and meaning of human services. In this book, a proposed “care market model” (CMM) is presented, and all subsequent parts are based on this proposed model.

The origin of the problem of low-quality services that the human services market has faced for many years is that discussion about market design has taken place separately in each of the respective fields. In other words, the debate about the form that the growth of human services should take, the proposed market to provide such services, and the verification thereof has not taken place in an integrated manner. The Oxford Handbook of Welfare States (2010), an edited volume on welfare policy authored more than 70 experts in their respective fields, establishes that sociologists are most strongly interested in social integration, economists in economic efficiency, political scientists in conflicts between social hierarchies, and researchers of social policy in remedying poverty. There has been a noticeable lack of an integrated discussion that transcends the boundaries of each of these fields. From this viewpoint, this book attempts to provide a proposal from a three-dimensional perspective while also giving consideration to each of these fields.

For more information, see Human Services and Long-term Care: A Market Model.