Situating Care in Health Economics

Working Paper 2013:02

Authors: John Davis and Robert McMaster 

Standard health economics concentrates on the provision of care by medical professionals. Yet ‘care’ receives scant analysis; it is portrayed as a spillover effect or externality in the form of interdependent utility functions. This conceptualisation is subject to considerable problems, stemming from its reliance on a reductionist social model that centres on instrumental rationality and consequentialism with its subsequent disregard for the deontological (moral rules and duties) and compassionate aspects of behaviour. Care as an externality is a second-order concern relative to self-interested utility maximization, and is crowded out by the parameters of the standard model. We explore an alternative approach to conceptualising care based on the social embeddedness of the individual that emphasises the deontological properties of care.