Health Economics

Health is an elusive concept to define from the beginning. Various communities have different concepts of health as part of their culture. With the demands on health care ever increasing the costs of interventions as well as their benefits must be assessed concurrently. This is the area covered by the science of health economics which play an increasing role throughout all health services as an aid to prioritizing the deployment of resources. The rapid increase in health care expenditure is a global phenomenon. Health economics is about resource management - what is affordable and desirable and what is not. The aim of economics applied of health field or health economics is to quantify overtime the resources used in health service delivery and to organize allocate and manage them in such a way that they are used for health purposes with maximum efficiency in preventive curative and rehabilitative health services so as to achieve maximal individual and national productivity. Hence Health economics is becoming a subject of increasing significance particularly in the developing countries.