Health Economics

Catalog description

This course will focus on the application of economic principles to examine issues in health economics. The first part of the course will focus on theoretical models of supply and demand for health and health care, and the transformation of health care into health. We will then apply these models to understand how health insurance markets work, the importance of externalities in health and health care, the interaction between markets for health and labor, and the role of government intervention in health care provision. We will also discuss key characteristics of current health care programs in the United States and elsewhere. Overall, this course will be a combination of discussion of important issues in health care, learning models that are helpful in explaining various aspects of health care and understanding what is known empirically. By the end of the course, students should be able to use economic reasoning to think critically about health-related policy issues.