What Is Health Economic Consulting?

What is your health worth to you? If you could somehow store it up for a future event

, how far would you go and how much would you pay to do so? While you can't put health into a savings account for a rainy day (I have cancer? No problem! I'll just cash in my $1M health bucks!), health economics evaluate the effectiveness and efficacy of various health care systems as related to your financial means and health ratings.

A scenario: you are suffering from various symptoms that you feel need to be checked out by a physician. Your doctor has a look and decides to run some tests, but you balk at the cost of the tests due to financial constraints and inadequate health care insurance coverage. You must now decide if the costs of the tests will likely provide you with the information you need to restore your health. After all, your doctor won't be charged thousands of dollars for the tests, and he can recommend just about anything he feels will be useful in gathering information for a diagnosis.

In your situation, he isn't sure what is the cause of your issues, alone or combined.

The scope of health economics can be summed up by reviewing Alan Williams's Plumbing Diagram. This diagram distinguishes eight topics of the discipline:

1.What influences health other than heath care?

2.What is health and what is its value?

3.The demand for health care. If you consider health to be a commodity that you both consume and produce, you will be able to gauge how much health care will be in demand by also evaluating how healthy the general public considers itself and what the norm of health is generally thought to be.

4.The supply of health care.

5.Micro-economic evaluation at treatment level.

6.Market equilibrium. Someone without health insurance is going to be much more concerned with the cost of health care than someone with insurance. Referring to the above scenario, if you feel your budget does not allow for pricey tests, will you shop around for a better cash price or forego them altogether? Someone with excellent coverage may not even question the price of any particular test, which creates what is called a "moral hazard," and is key to driving up health care costs. Because it is competition that drives costs of other goods and services down, how is this moral hazard affecting health and health care for the general public?

7.Evaluation at whole-system level.

8.Planning, budgeting, and monitoring mechanisms.

While you can't hang a dollar sign on the exact health care costs of any individual for the future or the value of any individual's intrinsic health, health economics consultants attempt to take a very studied and informed look at how to evaluate and in some ways predict health costs to an individual or group of individuals. With this information, you can make better decisions, be more aware of broad-topic statistics, and figure out where to put your money where it will be most useful.

by: Art Gib

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