Introduction to U.S. Health Care

Objectives

• Recall the total annual expenditures on health and health care in the U.S.
• Compare U.S. health expenditures and quality to that of other countries
• Explain the debate surrounding the role of prices in U.S. health care expenditures
• Summarize some of the unique economic features of the U.S. health care market

Activities

• Review the syllabus, schedule, content, and assignments pages for this class…just to get a feel for the site and how to navigate all of the information.
• Discussion of U.S. health care expenditures and quality
• Overview of class and introductions
• Complete the Math Review and Practice Problems

Readings and related info

• These articles are more of a guide for the semester. We’ll touch on most of the topics covered in the articles over the next several weeks. Reading these papers now can really help to prepare you for the whole semester.
  • Kenneth J. Arrow, “Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care,” The American Economics Review 53, no. 5 (1963). Link to paper here.
  • M Gaynor, K Ho, and R Town, “The Industrial Organization of Health Care Markets,” Journal of Economic Literature 47, no. 2 (2015): 235–284. Link to paper here.
• Supplemental information we’ll use throughout this module.
  • Data from Gapminder
  • For a good discussion of hospital prices and something called “charges,” see Gerard F Anderson et al., “It’s the Prices, Stupid: Why the United States Is so Different from Other Countries,” Health Affairs 22, no. 3 (2003): 89–105. Link to paper here.
  • Healthcare triage videos: The Healthcare System of the United States and Why Does the US Spend So Much On Healthcare?
  • Time, 2013. Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills are Killing Us
  • Forbes, 2018. Healthcare: It’s the prices, stupid. Isn’t it?
  • Blog, Random Critical Analysis, November 2018. “Why everything you have said about the determinants of health expenditure is wrong in one million charts: A response to Noah Smith.”

Slides

The goal of this module is to answer the key questions that anyone should want answered when they start to learn something new, “what, why, who, and how?” That is, “what are we learning and why?” “who is learning it?” and “how are we going to learn it?” Why are you taking this class? What’s so interesting about health economics? Hopefully this part of our discussion convinces you how important and interesting health economics is.

Use the buttons below to open the slides either as an interactive website or as a static PDF (for printing or storing for later). You can also click in the embedded slides and navigate through them with your left and right arrow keys.