Health care refers to services for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of illness. Health care also includes services to promote and maintain good health, and it is a large industry worldwide. It involves a wide range of activities and providers, including hospitals, medical clinics, dentists and ophthalmologists, pharmacies, laboratory services, nursing homes and home health agencies, psychologists and counselors, physiotherapists, and many others. It is a highly complex system, and the relationship between health outcomes and the quality of health care is often ambiguous.
The goal of health care is not simply to treat sick individuals, but rather to improve the health and well-being of society as a whole. This is why societies spend so much money on health care, through direct personal expenditures and forgone wages as well as indirect taxes. In return, they hope to achieve improved health outcomes and greater longevity.
However, there are considerable limitations to the effectiveness of health care. For example, there is often a poor correlation between health care expenditures and health outcomes. Moreover, the quality of health care varies widely between countries, even within developed nations. This is due to a variety of factors, such as differences in the culture and values of individual patients, variations in the availability of resources and technology, and different methods of financing and delivering healthcare.
In an ideal market economy, competition drives service providers to improve the quality of their products and services, largely by eliminating poor performers or at least rewarding those who are doing better. This is an appealing tenet, but it depends on the assumption that health consumers have perfect information and that the market can be accessed by competitors at a relatively low cost.
It is widely recognized that the underlying problem of health care is the difficulty of measuring its effectiveness. This is partly because the ultimate measure of success is based on an elusive concept, “health,” and because outcomes vary so much between individual patients. Moreover, the measurement of patient satisfaction is inherently subjective and difficult to evaluate.
In addition, the health care system is heavily regulated by both state and federal governments. This regulation is aimed at protecting patients from ineffective or fraudulent health care. This includes licensing of physicians, testing of pharmaceuticals and medical devices, and government oversight of medical schools and teaching hospitals. Despite this regulatory environment, the United States ranks last in most measures of the effectiveness of its health care system. This is largely because many people lack access to affordable and reliable health insurance, and are therefore less likely to receive preventive services or to be referred to specialists for more extensive or costly care. The result is a health care system that does not meet the needs of most citizens, and which may be unsustainable in its current form. Consequently, a substantial number of individuals are seeking alternatives to the current health care system. Alternatives to the existing system include private insurance, community-based care programs and public non-profit organizations that operate under a patient-majority governing board.