Kierunki badania kosztów opieki zdrowotnej

Abstract

Problems concerning studies on costs of health services receive an increasingly bigger attention among economists. Simultaneously, these problems constitute one of research directions in a comparatively new scientific discipline health economies. The world literature of the subject contains many concepts as regards analysis of health care costs. Some of them have been presented in this article. The studies are focused on the problem of choice among various variants of providing health services. That is due to the fact that research procedures are based on existence of alternative health care forms differing from one another in costs incurred for them and similar from the viewpoint of medical effectiveness. The most popular techniques adopted for examination of costs in the world are cost-benefit and cos t-effectiveness analyses type. Meanwhile, in Poland studies on costs are at their initial stage and they require constant work on research methods. This creates a necessity of verifying in practice the accepted theoretical solutions.