Question

What concepts we include in health while calculating the quality of population.​

Answer 1

Answer:

The novel challenge of a national health account is measuring health. In order to answer the question “What are people getting for their health care dollar?” it is necessary to be able to track the health of the population and its subgroups accurately, including those in vulnerable segments of the population. The broad health account requires data on medical care expenditures (and other nonmedical and nonmarket health-affecting inputs) and on the health benefits derived, which are what patients and, collectively, society seek to purchase. The output side of the account is quantified in terms represented by the population’s health. Monitoring changing population health on a disease-by-disease basis is also relevant to medical care accounting in the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPAs) because, as discussed in Chapters 2 and 4, tracking health outcomes will ultimately play a key role in quality adjusting the price of medical treatments. Data on health inputs and outputs are also crucial for researchers attempting to link the two sides of the equation—that is, to attribute deaths and impairment to diseases, medical conditions, and other causal factors.

In a satellite health account, output associated with investments in health should be measured independently of inputs. Previous chapters of this report have discussed options for measuring the output of medical care (the treatments), which is an input to health. Independent measurement of health, however, means going beyond simply adding up the value of inputs to yield a value for the output side of the account. In estimating that value, both components of output—the consumption flow of good health and the additional (or reduced) income that a healthier (or less healthy) population generates—should be measured (National Research Council, 2005, pp. 131–132).