Health economics, the integration of healthcare and economics, is crucial for understanding and addressing healthcare system complexities. The exploration begins with foundational concepts, covering resource allocation, decision-making, and policy formulation in healthcare. It analyses the production, distribution, and consumption of healthcare services, considering economic factors like costs, benefits, and equity.
Further, it delves into healthcare demand, discussing the law of demand, elasticity, utility, and demand forecasting. The dynamics of healthcare production are examined, including supply, medical care supply, and elasticity. The implications of various market structures on healthcare markets are explored, along with pricing intricacies, importance, objectives, and strategies. Shifting the focus to India, the study includes healthcare reform plans, system models, and impacts. Economic evaluation methods are discussed in the context of national health programs and their role in decision-making. The intricacies of health policy, encompassing conundrums, theorems, models, and real-world examples, are explored.
The journey concludes with an examination of health insurance markets, regulation of healthcare providers, national health policies, and the social dimensions of health policy. This comprehensive exploration provides a holistic understanding of health economics.
Contents –
1. Health Economics – Introduction
2. Demand Analysis
3. Supply Analysis
4. Market Structures
5. Pricing Decisions
6. Health Care Reforms in India
7. Economic Evaluation
8. Health Policy
9. Health Insurance Market
