Summary: Economics Of Health And Healthcare

Read the summary and the most important questions on Economics of health and healthcare

• 1 Economic concepts

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• What is a demand curve?

  It shows how the consumers maximize utility. 
  Turning goods into utility.
  

  • It is based on consumers preferences and a budget constraintconstraint maximisation

• What are the three preference assumptions?

  1. Completeness; prefering one budle rather than another
     
  2. transivity; if you prefer x to y, and y to z, you've got to prefere x to z
  3. non-satiation: More is always better

• What is an indifference curve? And what are there properties?

  It is a showing of the preference max of an individual.
  

  • consumers prefer higher indifference curves - further from origin.
  •  They are always downsloping. 

• What is an utility function?

  The rate at which you are willing to trade-off. The slope = indifferent. Given your limited budget, you must make a trade-off that is dependend on how you feel (preferences)

• What is a demand curve?

  It shows how the producers maximize profit.
  

  • The key is production efficiency 

• What is economies of scale (returns to scale)?

  If a firm doubles input, there are three possible things that could happen to the output?
  

  • constant returns to scale; doubling inputs = doubling outputs
  • increasing returns to scale; doubling inputs = more than doubling outputs
  • decreasing returns to scale; doubling inputs = less than doubling outputs

• What is the Purchasing Power Parity made up from and what is its use (PPP)?

  • Market exchange rate set on the foreign exchange market tend to be influenced by other factors such as government intervention different interest rates speculation trading and hedging.
    
  • PPP rates are determined by comparing the prices of identical items in different countries.
  • PPP is often used to make more accurate comparisons between two countries gross domestic product (GDP).

• 2 Lecture 1: Production of health

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• What is the aim of health systems?

  The aim is to improve health and health distributions
  

  • The distributions are presented in means: life-expectancy, GDP, etc.
  •  These means hide a lot of  inequalities 

• How is measurement of marginal health production of health care and income hampered? (3)

  Population health measurement
  

  • hard to measure
    

  Estimation of marginal contribution ≠ total contribution
  

  • health care systems are important at the margin. 1% more at the margin is different to the total contribution. 
    

  Reverse causality and confounding

• What do we see in worldwide trend in income and health?

  Health and income are associated but income and health are  also very unequally distributed both within and between countries