Great article! Thanks for explaining so clearly the economics behind healthcare I as a layman would have otherwise not known about. Very basically speaking, I don’t want to be reduced to an average for decisions on whether my condition will have access to sufficient options for treatment — I wonder if this awareness is motivating enough for people to work harder in protecting their health.
Hi Jan, glad you enjoyed the article! While risk of some diseases can be reduced by taking proactive measures, many diseases without sufficient "acceptable" treatment options may be due to "randomness", such as certain forms of cancer. These may also be rarer diseases which are not able to enjoy economies of scale to get the cost of better treatments reduced. Nonetheless, the shift to preventive healthcare worldwide is motivating governments to create campaigns to get people to protect their health more than ever before (e.g. 5-a-day campaign in the UK, walking for a certain time per day, etc.). Maybe they see the long-term ICER of these campaigns to be below a certain threshold? Would be an interesting area of research to do an ICER analysis for such campaigns.
Another interesting thread of thought here, is that how we could assign ICER scores to non-healthcare things - maybe more broadly addressing the social determinants of healthcare, like we discussed in our prior articles: https://heacare.substack.com/p/honeybee-healthcare
Great article! Thanks for explaining so clearly the economics behind healthcare I as a layman would have otherwise not known about. Very basically speaking, I don’t want to be reduced to an average for decisions on whether my condition will have access to sufficient options for treatment — I wonder if this awareness is motivating enough for people to work harder in protecting their health.
Hi Jan, glad you enjoyed the article! While risk of some diseases can be reduced by taking proactive measures, many diseases without sufficient "acceptable" treatment options may be due to "randomness", such as certain forms of cancer. These may also be rarer diseases which are not able to enjoy economies of scale to get the cost of better treatments reduced. Nonetheless, the shift to preventive healthcare worldwide is motivating governments to create campaigns to get people to protect their health more than ever before (e.g. 5-a-day campaign in the UK, walking for a certain time per day, etc.). Maybe they see the long-term ICER of these campaigns to be below a certain threshold? Would be an interesting area of research to do an ICER analysis for such campaigns.
Another interesting thread of thought here, is that how we could assign ICER scores to non-healthcare things - maybe more broadly addressing the social determinants of healthcare, like we discussed in our prior articles: https://heacare.substack.com/p/honeybee-healthcare
👍