History Evolution Health Care Economics Timeline Funding, Essay

history evolution health care economics timeline funding, defined terms; Inelasticity, Macroeconomics, supply demand, economics, microeconomics, gross dosmestic product • Include resources. • The paper -- including tables graphs, headings, title page, reference page -- consistent APA formatting guidelines meets -level requirements.

History of health care economics

Throughout the past recent years, the cost of health care has been amounting as a result of numerous social, economic and other categories of pressures, such as the aging of the population, the increasing living standards or the rapid advancement of technology. In this context, the cost of health care in the total gross domestic product is gradually becoming unsustainable for the country.

The economic interest of health care provision was first revealed nearly five decades ago, but at that stage, the analyses were conducted at a microeconomic level. They were taking into consideration limited economic variables and they generated results with a limited applicability and which did not reflect the reality in the society. Gradually, the methods of the economic evaluation of health care have changed to become more inclusive of macroeconomic variables, such as national costs, but also more critical due to the inclusion of specific analyses. In 1996, Blumenschein and Johannesson wrote:

"Economic evaluations started about 30 years ago as rather crude analyses, in which the value of improved health was measured in terms of increased labor production.Now, more refined methods are available to measure health changes in terms of quality-adjusted life-years gained or willingness to pay. It is important to continue this development, and major fields for future work include the incorporation of quality-of-life measurements into economic evaluations and the linking of cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analyses into a unified framework of economic evaluation."

At the end of the twentieth century, the health care sector continued to be exclusively focused on the medical act, without major interest on the economics of health care. Starting with the beginning of the twenty first century however, the health care sector commenced to better realize and implement the principles of demand and offer in the provision of medical services. In other words, the turn of the twenty first century revealed an increasing focus on "health care financing and organizational structure" (Cox, Pacala, Vercellotti and Shea, 2004).

These two new dimensions of health care provision were not only more and more important within medical institutions, but they were also coming to be more present in the educational dimension of health care (Cox, Pacala, Vercellotti and Shea, 2004). In other words, the future doctors were formed and trained to also possess financial knowledge regarding the operations in the health care sector.

An important dimension of the financial aspects of health care is represented by the elasticity of.....