The elementary health care priorities

Abstract

I study a very simple model of the natural development of the disease where a living individual can be in the continuous time either healthy or ill. The value from being in each of the two states can be represented by a pair of Bellman equations. This leads to the expressions for willingness to pay for procedures changing transition rates between healthy, ill and death states. Based on findings concerning the so-called financial satisfaction and approximations of transition rates I estimated the willingness to pay for basic types of health care in the developed and developing society. The results obtained can be used to determine some priorities of the health care. In both types of society almost all priorities turned out to be identical. Particularly, the intensive care has priority over the prevention which next takes priority over the medicine. The only exception concerns a lifesaving situation in case of a terminal disease. Such a uniformity of fundamental priorities of the health care, being revealed in spite of distinct development differences, lets us reasonably suppose that there exist elementary health care priorities being invariably characteristic of a human society.