Health Programs as Social Programs: Navigating Difficult Healthcare Policy Decisions
Abstract
Apart from public health and preventive medicine campaigns, a health authority funds healthcare programs primarily for the purpose of immediately improving clinical patient out comes. For individual health treatments, funding decisions by Canadian provincial govern ments incorporate some equivalent of a costbenefit calculation,such as the costeffectiveness analysis (CEA). This research is important to health policy makers because it considers the effects of expanding a CEA to analyze societal impacts that are already of importance to the government when the appropriateness or accuracy of the costbenefit calculation is unclear. I use the example of in vitro fertilization funding programs to demonstrate the argument that health programs may also address other relevant issues related to the social determinants of health.
Copyright (c) 2021 Samuel Kris Case Seshadri

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