Health and Economics

Running head: HEALTH ECONOMICS1
Health Economics in Context
Student Name
College/University Affiliation
HEALTH ECONOMICS

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Abstract
Health economics is an emerging discipline departing from conventional economic study. Focused on distributional disparities, competitive advantages, regulatory matters of healthcare provision in public and private sectors, health economics provides decision makers with necessary information to optimize economic decisions in healthcare contexts. To put basic economic concepts into a practical context, a specific healthcare organization, namely Mayo Clinic, is selected. The applied concepts include Scarcity, Opportunity Costs, Marginal Analysis, Supply and Demand, Competition, Efficiency, and Market Failure.
HEALTH ECONOMICS

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Health Economics in Context
The healthcare profession has developed into a more complex, interdisciplinary research and practice area. The emergence of new challenges at local, national and global scales has made imperative a development of new, more specialized healthcare services informed by mutiple disciplines. If anything, health economics has come to define research and practice in and beyond healthcare. For definition,
Health Economics is an applied field of study that allows for the systematic and rigorous examination of the problems faced in promoting health for all. By applying economic theories of consumer, producer and social choice, health economics aims to understand the behavior of individuals, health care providers, public and private organizations, and governments in decision-making. (“What Is Health Economics?” n.d.)
In essence, health economics departs from different forms of economic study in placing special focus on distributional disparities, competitive advantages, regulatory matters of healthcare provision in public and private sectors. In so doing, health economics is a sub-discipline of economics aimed, ultimately, to inform decision makers about optimum pricing and product development and distribution strategies for a more affordable and sustainable resource allocation.
At Mayo Clinic, several economic concepts can be applied for more understanding. For current purposes, concepts of Scarcity, Opportunity Costs, Marginal Analysis, Supply and Demand, Competition, Efficiency, and Market Failure are described.
The concept of Scarcity is applicable to Mayo Clinic in a context of scarce COVID-19 information. Understood as a resource gap between supply and demand, scarcity of COVID-19
HEALTH ECONOMICS

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information at Mayo Clinic can be described as a global demand for research, clinical and medical information about COVID-19 and short supply of such information resources Mayo Clinic is still narrowing by calling for donations to fund research (“Donation In...