Health Economics

Health economics is a branch of economics concerned with issues related to effectiveness, efficiency, value and actors’ behavior in the production and consumption of health and health care. A key topic for health economists is the study of the functioning of health care systems including analysis of costs and benefits of individual interventions in use or under consideration for introduction in a health care system.

The course puts emphasis on providing a basic background in key topics in health economics followed by an overview of analytical techniques in health economics with special emphasis on cost effectiveness analysis, cost-benefit analysis and cost-utility analysis, challenges associated with utilizing these techniques, and tools aimed at overcoming such challenges.

The course includes a mix of presentations of topics in health economics and analytical techniques, exercises and preparation of a synopsis (under supervision), and e-learning.

Learning outcome: After having followed the course the student has acquired:

• Knowledge about key topics in health care including financing of health care systems, how health care differs from the standard model for perfect competition contributing to market failure, and how government failure may reduce efficiency in public health care.

• Sufficient knowledge and experience to critically evaluate the preconditions in a cost-effectiveness-analysis, a cost-benefit-analysis or a cost-utility analysis; select the relevant design for analyzing a problem in the field of health economics and perform independently a simple cost-effectiveness-analysis, cost-benefit-analysis or cost-utility-analysis