History Evolution Health Care Economics Timeline Funding,

¶ … history evolution health care economics timeline funding, defined terms; Inelasticity, Macroeconomics, supply demand, economics, microeconomics, gross dosmestic product • Include resources. • The paper -- including tables graphs, headings, title page, reference page -- consistent APA formatting guidelines meets -level requirements.

History of health care economics

Throughout the past recent years, the cost of health care has been amounting as a result of numerous social, economic and other categories of pressures, such as the aging of the population, the increasing living standards or the rapid advancement of technology. In this context, the cost of health care in the total gross domestic product is gradually becoming unsustainable for the country.

The economic interest of health care provision was first revealed nearly five decades ago, but at that stage, the analyses were conducted at a microeconomic level. They were taking into consideration limited economic variables and they generated results with a limited applicability and which did not reflect the reality in the society. Gradually, the methods of the economic evaluation of health care have changed to become more inclusive of macroeconomic variables, such as national costs, but also more critical due to the inclusion of specific analyses. In 1996, Blumenschein and Johannesson wrote:

"Economic evaluations started about 30 years ago as rather crude analyses, in which the value of improved health was measured in terms of increased labor production. Now, more refined methods are available to measure health changes in terms of quality-adjusted life-years gained or willingness to pay. It is important to continue this development, and major fields for future work include the incorporation of quality-of-life measurements into economic evaluations and the linking of cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analyses into a unified framework of economic evaluation."

At the end of the twentieth century, the health care sector continued to be exclusively focused on the medical act, without major interest on the economics of health care. Starting with the beginning of the twenty first century however, the health care sector commenced to better realize and implement the principles of demand and offer in the provision of medical services. In other words, the turn of the twenty first century revealed an increasing focus on "health care financing and organizational structure" (Cox, Pacala, Vercellotti and Shea, 2004).

These two new dimensions of health care provision were not only more and more important within medical institutions, but they were also coming to be more present in the educational dimension of health care (Cox, Pacala, Vercellotti and Shea, 2004). In other words, the future doctors were formed and trained to also possess financial knowledge regarding the operations in the health care sector.

An important dimension of the financial aspects of health care is represented by the elasticity of demand, which is often associated with the increasing price of health care services. In this order of ideas, the demand for medical services is generically accepted as inelastic, which basically means that the demand suffers little or no change upon a change in the price of the medical act. As a consequence, the providers of medical services and equipments (including pharmaceutical companies) have been continually able to raise costs without suffering a decrease in demands.

This trait is the result of more economic principles being integrated in the process of medical care provision. Throughout the past recent decades then, the medical sector has also come to pay attention to economic features, such as the financing of the medical act, the reimbursement of the services, the profitability of the sector, the operational efficiency, return on the investments in new technologies, staff training and so on.

The increased attention paid to the economics of health care has generated a series of results, of both positive as well as negative natures. At the level of the positive impacts, the most notable of them is represented by the increase in the quality of the medical act, as well as the financial responsibilization of the medical staffs. Still, on the other hand, the negative impact is materialized in the decreasing access to medical care due to issues of affordability.

The legislations in the country currently state that medical care would not be denied to patients regardless of economic background, yet free health care becomes weaker and the providers less economically able to support it. And in the context of the economic crisis, people come to neglect their own health due to economic concerns:

"Consumers are self denying care due to economic concerns. With the rise in unemployment, providers are finding more patients are not able to pay for services. While EMTALA laws dictate that patients will not be refused care, providers are looking to cut cost in order to manage the rising uncompensated care" (McConnell, 2012).