Social Considerations in Healthcare Systems (Modern Trends in Health Economics Conference, 2019)
Channel: Sam Vaknin's Musings
Date: 2019-01-08

Video presentation Modern Trends in Health Economics, Healthcare, and Technologies 2019, Venice, May 2019

https://www.longdom.com/healtheconomics/ocm

There are as many health systems and models as there are countries. This is because healthcare is a public good and, thus, reflects the social and cultural values of the societies that design and adopt them.
 
I. Social and Cultural Values
 
We should distinguish social and cultural values from economic and operational values. Efficiency, for instance, is an economic-operational value, not a social-cultural one. Equity (though often considered an economic criterion) is actually a normative social-cultural value whose pursuit often comes at a steep economic price and is non-efficient. Health systems can be categorized according to which class of values they emphasize: the American (US) health system is geared to satisfy economic-operational requirements while European health systems place a premium on social-cultural ones.
 
In this paper, I deal with three social-cultural constraints: solidarity, equity (vs. inequity), and progressivity (vs. regressivity), including the issue of redistribution. There are many other social-cultural values that I do not cover in here: fairness, dignity, and choice come to mind. Finally, I provide a discussion of the concept of "public good" in current literature.