I attended the 4th Health Economics Conference at TSE. Here are my takeaways.

Group photo at the conference. By Loic Bourniquel. (Click to zoom)

On June 16-17, 2026, I had the opportunity to attend the 4th Health Economics Conference at the Toulouse School of Economics (TSE). Having focused my bachelor’s thesis on health economics, this conference was a valuable opportunity to engage directly with frontier empirical research on market design, public financing, and institutional organization.

Across the scientific sessions, presentations discussed how administrative datasets and quasi-experimental designs expose frictions in healthcare markets that deviate from textbook competitive assumptions. Papers evaluated the allocative efficiency of surgical waitlists in private insurance, frictions in insurance take-up, the dynamic health consequences of patient cost-sharing in middle-income countries, and the structural welfare impacts of hospital consolidation. A high-level policy roundtable brought academic researchers together with regulators from the European Commission, the French Economic Committee for Health Products (CEPS), and pharmaceutical industry leaders to evaluate the international spillovers of United States Most Favored Nation drug pricing rules.

The core conceptual anchors of the conference were delivered in two keynote lectures. Professor Neale Mahoney from Stanford University examined the structural expansion of the healthcare labor force and the rapid rise of midlevel clinical practitioners. Professor Jonathan Gruber from MIT presented a new international taxonomy distinguishing universal healthcare access from universal coverage, addressing the long-term fiscal pressures of population aging and curative biomedical therapies.

Below you’ll find two posts where I synthesize the empirical findings, econometric frameworks, and policy conclusions from each keynote lecture in full.