Patients' needs and healthcare markets

The objective of the course is to get a better understanding of the mechanisms driving the health expenditures. At the end of the course the students are expected to be familiar with the main economic models adopted to explain variations in health expenditures and health outcomes, and how the policy maker should intervene to deal with those variations.

The students are expected to get two main outcomes. First they will be knowledgeable of the different institutional settings which characterize the policy makers' responses to the failures in the health care market. This first part will be achieved through the work on the textbook. Second they will be able to critically discuss and evaluate reforms of the healthcare sector on the base of the available data. This second part will be achieved through discussions of empirical papers in small group. They are expected to be responsible citizens and being able to understand in the future the consequences of political proposals to reform the health care system.