ABSTRACT
There are places where health economics and health economists should not go, and the topics discussed in this collection would, on the face of it, appear to be prime candidates for us to avoid. However, a health economics perspective can prove particularly useful in addressing the question of what is proper when resources are at stake and when all possible claims on such resources are competing with each other. That perspective allows us to assess competing claims in relation to one another rather than looking at each in isolation. Such relative assessment is particularly important in the context of most advanced economies, almost all of which operate publicly funded health care systems, resourced through the allocation of fixed funding envelopes, and such systems form the context of our suggested approach. Given this, the term ‘proper’, from an economics perspective, can be equated to achieving the most benefit from limited resources, and two theoretical principles from economics can usefully be brought to bear in deciding on the appropriateness of health interventions: opportunity cost and marginal analysis. In this chapter, these will be described using a well-known example from the medical literature, though it is unrelated in terms of clinical context to those examples appearing elsewhere in this collection.
