January 22nd
Office at St. Albert Hall Rm 104
Term Paper is worth 10 point: any topics based on health care economics
Two midterms: 25 points each
Final: 40 points
Chapter 1
Affordable Care Act: everyone gets what they want
There is a scarcity. A shortage of health care: b/c there is an imbalance of the amount and supply
3 basic questions
What to produce oWhat type of drug is better?
How to produce o How to provide our health care service For whom to produce o Affordable Care Act allows us to include more people in the health care o This money comes from taxes
Level of specialization is going up
The two extremes is:
Market mechanism: there is no intervention from the government; run by the manufacture Government intervention: the govt has complete control
Scarcity is the central problem of economics. It's always there and is naturallytioccurring.
Microeconomics: deals with a particular market
Opportunity cost: the loss of a good or service in order to obtain something else
Marginal Benefit -> to move my grade from B to A
Marginal Cost -> lost pleasure of chatting with friends
If MB fi MC -> then you will not study
If MB > MC -> then you will study
Nature of opportunity cost: there's always an alternative and you give up your other choices. For example if you're choosing a major between pharmacy, pretimed, journalism, and engineering and you're most interested in pharmacy then pretimed and so forth. So you find the reasons to choose pharmacy. Its shorter and less money, no med school, start making money faster, etc. so in value pharmacy is higher than pretimed. So if you decide to go for pharmacy the opportunity to do pretimed is your opportunity cost. There is only one opportunity cost. There are different values. So the value attached to journalism is lower than the value attached to pretimed. Opportunity cost can be unknown.
Four factors of production
Land -- all natural resources without human intervention oEx: air, water, etc
Labor ti human resource Capital -- Physical capital: factories and equipment Human capital: education and training Difference between human capital and labor The labor is a service of anyone that works Human capital is accumulated education ff training Entrepreneurship -- ability to start new business
Production Possibility Curve (PPC)
Factors are land, labor, capital and entrepreneurship The points resemble the maximum resources you can use with the given conditions In order to produce an outward shift -> they must change one of the 4 factors of a combo of them An inward shift -> natural disaster, labor inefficient, finance issues
To expand the curve
.
We have to increase at least one of the four factors of production o Investment
Expand facilities or train the workers more
How does society shift the drug force and dispensing drugs? Pharmacy technicians take more of the workload while pharmacists are more specialized
The two parties of our political system focus on different type o