Health care is best provided by the government to the entire population

Introduction

Microeconomics - the field of economics that studies the behavior of individual consumers, businesses and markets. It is a science dealing with the detailed analysis undertaken by individual decisions about buying and selling goods. In a study of microeconomic economy of a country or region is treated as a collection of entities, not as a single organism (as in macroeconomics). The strong now mainstream neoclassical economics we find almost exclusively mathematical (statistical, analytical) model of behavior sets of entities, such as consumers, enterprises, public institutions etc.

Governance of public hospitals

Boards of Non-profit hospitals are typically organized under the voluntary model—board members do not get paid for their service. A 2007 survey of The Governance Institute reported that only 9.5% of hospitals used cash compensation for their board chairs, and 8.3% reported providing compensation to other board members. While hospital boards have remained generally voluntary, other core elements have changed—changes that reflect evolving issues for health care. In response to financial events such as the collapse of Enron and abuses at other major companies and the controversy related to tax exempt status and community benefit, boards have created committees focused on executive compensation. As suggested by Owens (2005), “To address the current probe by the Internal Revenue Service, hospitals must begin to link their executive compensation with their organizational mission” (p. 237). Following the 1999 report of the Institute of Medicine, To Err Is Human, which reported that up to 98,000 patients die in hospitals annually due to preventable medical errors, many hospital boards have incorporated a quality committee into their structure, seeing oversight of the core outcome of the enterprise as a key factor in their responsibility. In further transition, as hospital boards have faced increasingly complex financing, a highly competitive environment, and the need for strategic thinking, they have tended to constitute their membership differently—moving from a country club model in which appointments are made based on status and position in the community to a more professional model.

Hospital “boards tend to devote more attention to recruiting members based on the organization's needs and candidates' expertise so those members can provide substantive input” (The Governance Institute, 2008, p. 64). At the heart of these transitions is a need driven by both internal and external forces for greater transparency, accountability, and independence among hospital boards and executive management (Harris, pp. 32).

Social protection and health, first spending

In 2005, government expenditure (APU), including the State, reaching 919.7 billion Euros, or 53.8% of GDP (Table 1). Social protection, health, general services and education represent 80.7% of total public expenditure. The largest item of expenditure (42.2% or 387.7 billion Euros) is spent on social protection: Risk retirement, unemployment, family, exclusion, disability, and dependence. These expenses are comprised overwhelmingly (85.8%) of benefits, paid primarily by social security funds (78.3%), but also by the State (13.1%), which provides in particular payment of pensions for civil servants. Local authorities, mainly the departments responsible for social assistance, ...