ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the determinants of health and about the contribution of health care. The study of the production of health function requires that we inquire about the relationship between health inputs and health. The marginal contribution of health care is its marginal product, meaning the increment to health caused by one extra unit of Health Care, holding all other inputs constant. Effective medicine is a fairly recent phenomenon, and the delivery of effective medical interventions on a scale sufficient to affect population health indicators most likely appeared only well into the twentieth century. Many medical historians agree that practitioner-provided medical interventions played only a small, perhaps negligible, role in the historical decline in population mortality rates. The notion that medicine played a relatively minor historical role is certainly not new, and it has been asserted by researchers of various ideologies. "Evidence-based medicine" aims to close the gap between outcomes research and physician practice.
