Factors of health demand

 

Compare and contrast primary individual factors of health demand, elasticity, principle, and agent that influence medical care demand, and explain the significant ways in which each affects the medical care demand curve. Provide at least one example of these factors to support your rationale.

Sample Solution

Human beings have always attempted to maintain and improve their health by expanding their health reserves, which is at the heart of sustainable development. In general, the usage of services or demand for medical services plays an important part in enhancing a person’s health. Healthcare demand is generated from health demand and is influenced by a variety of factors such as price, income, population, and so on. When asked why health is essential, many people are unable to respond. This could be due to a lack of understanding of the value of health and, as a result, a lack of sufficient self-care.

Decision-making is an act as old as humankind and the ancestors of modern humans made daily decisions based on interpretations of dreams, smokes, divinations and oracles (Buchanan and O’Connell, 2018). According to Gigerenzer (2011), modern decision-making dates back to the seventeen century; when Descartes and Pointcarre invented the first calculus of decision-making. Buchanan and O’Connell (2018) attributes the popularity of modern decision- making to Chester Barnard in the middle of the twentieth century; for importing the terminology “ decision-making” which was mainly a public administration concept to the business sector to substitute restrictive narratives like policy making and resource allocation. William Starbuck, a professor in Oregon University acknowledges the positive impact of Chester Barnard’s introduction of decision- making on managers by explaining that policy-making and resource allocation are never ending acts, while decision denotes the conclusion of a discussion and start of an action plan (Buchanan and O’Connell, 2018). In addition, Gigerenzer (2011) suggests that the contemporary view of decision-making involves the use of heuristics and human information processing; which is the revolutionary work of Herbert Simon. Heuristics are mental short cuts, cognitive tools and rules of thumb developed through experiences, to enable individuals make judgements and arrive at decisions quickly (Gigerenzer and Gaissmaier, 2011).

2.6 Decision theory

Decision theory is a divergent field because of the different perceptions held by researchers about decisions (Hansson 2005). Decision theory also known as the theory of choice is the study of the rationale behind the choices made by an agent (Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, 2015). Decision theory deals with goal oriented behaviour in the presence of alternatives (Hansson, 2005). Decision theory can be broken into three branches namely; normative, descriptive and prescriptive branch (Vareman, 2008). Normative theory deals with how to make accurate decisions in a scenario of uncertainty and values, descriptive theory, examines the possibility of imperfect individuals making decision and prescriptive theory is a combination of descriptive and normative theories to achieve the best decision at any given situation (Vareman, 2008). However, there is no universal agreement on a standardized classification on the theories and therefore many researchers have classified the theories as either rational or non-rational (Gigerenezer, 2001; Hansson, 2005; Oliveira, 2007). In differentiating the rational from non-rational theory, Gigerenezer (2001) id

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