The article that blazed this health economics trail was "Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care."¹ Its author was Stanford University economics professor Kenneth J. Arrow, Ph.D., who in 1972 received the Nobel Prize in economics.

Thirty-six years after the paper’s publication, a group of scholars who had received Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research met to discuss the changing role of competition in health care. Three investigators - Deborah Haas-Wilson (Professor, Smith College), Peter Hammer (Assistant Professor, University of Michigan), and William Sage (Professor, Columbia University) - hit upon the notion of using the Arrow article, both its economic themes and its historic frame of reference, as a vehicle to explore the contemporary role of competition and regulation in health care markets. The end result was a special issue of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law (JHPPL) focusing on Arrow’s seminal work and the questions it raised, as a point of departure for understanding the direction that health care markets and public policy concerns have taken since the early 1960s.

Haas-Wilson, Hammer, and Sage, who shaped and edited the volume, invited Kenneth Arrow and 23 leading members of the health economics and health policy community (including 15 others affiliated with the RWJF Investigator Awards program and 8 outside experts) to collaborate and write about a constellation of nationally relevant issues. The roster of authors includes distinguished senior economists, some of today’s leading new economists, several law professors, and seven other scholars willing to tackle difficult and often neglected economic questions concerning the role of social institutions, social norms, and professionalism.

"Our objective in this special issue was to bring a sweeping, comprehensive, and detailed evaluation of Arrow’s article from multiple and sometimes competing perspectives and to use it as a springboard for an equally encompassing exploration of the economic, market, and institutional themes he brought together, and in some instances launched, with its publication," said Mark A. Peterson, Professor at UCLA and editor of JHPPL.