Health Economics: Core Concepts and Essential Tools

The healthcare landscape is shifting rapidly. A solid grounding in economics enables healthcare managers to make informed and thoughtful decisions in the face of changing market and regulatory demands.

Health Economics: Core Concepts and Essential Tools takes a unique, streamlined approach to explaining the building blocks of health economics. Rather than interweaving technical information with introductory content, each chapter is divided into two main sections: Core Concepts and Technical Material. This treatment allows students to gain an intuitive understanding of each chapter topic before delving into advanced graphs, equations, and other technical details.

Health Economics: Core Concepts and Essential Tools focuses on nine topics that are essential to understanding health economics and its connection to health policy:

• The purpose of health economics
• The relationship between health and wealth
• The production of health
• The production of health-related goods and services
• The demand for healthcare
• Perfect competition and other market structures
• Physician behavior
• The insurance market
• Cost-effectiveness analysis

The Core Concepts section in each chapter provides learning objectives and a straightforward but comprehensive overview of the chapter topic. The Technical Material section allows for deeper examination of the chapter topic through discussion of relevant literature as well as graphical examples and mathematical techniques.

About the Author

Steph Bernell, PhD, currently serves as an associate professor in and as the program coordinator of the Health Management and Policy programs at the College of Public Health and Human Sciences, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon. She received a BA and an MA in economics from the American University in Washington, DC, and a PhD in health economics from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Dr. Bernell s scholarly work combines her passion for health policy and politics with her desire to use economic tools to address an array of pressing public health issues, including HIV, disability, hunger, Medicaid, and health reform.