Take My SNHU HCM 320 Class

SNHU's catalog describes HCM 320 as the standard economic principles and tools that health care administrators use for effective decision making. The course takes the ideas of an introductory economics class and asks what happens when they meet a market as unusual as health care, where patients rarely see prices, insurers pay most bills, and the seller often decides how much the buyer needs.

Expect the core tools first: scarcity and opportunity cost, supply and demand, elasticity, marginal analysis and the production function. Then the course turns them on health care. Demand for medical care and the role of insurance, moral hazard and adverse selection, information asymmetry between doctors and patients, the supply of physicians, nurses and hospital beds, and the market structure of hospitals and insurers all tend to appear.

Later modules usually look at cost containment, cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analysis, government's role through Medicare, Medicaid and regulation, and comparisons with other countries.

Graded work often mixes discussion posts that apply a concept to a news story or a policy, problem sets with graphs and calculations, short papers, and a final project, such as an economic analysis of a health care issue, built through milestones.

Economics is a course where each idea builds on the last, so the writer reads the full syllabus and every rubric before drafting, and looks at the final project to see which tools it will need. If the project asks you to analyze an issue, such as rising drug prices, hospital mergers, physician shortages or the effect of insurance on demand, the writer agrees one with you early so each module can add to it.

Your weekly discussion draft reaches you a day or two ahead of the module. It explains the concept in plain terms and applies it to a real health care example, often from current news. Replies to classmates add a graph, a counterexample or a second effect they did not consider.

Problem sets are worked step by step, with graphs drawn and labeled and every calculation shown, so your instructor can follow the reasoning. Papers and milestones arrive with time for you to read them.

Comments from your instructor shape the next piece, and you submit everything yourself.

HCM 320 is written by people with graduate training in economics, health economics or health administration who have used economic analysis in health care work: analysts in hospital finance and strategy, policy researchers, and administrators who have weighed the costs and benefits of new services.

They can explain why insurance increases the quantity of care demanded, why physician-induced demand is debated, or why a hospital merger might raise prices, in language an undergraduate rubric rewards: clear, accurate and applied.

An editor checks every piece for correct economic reasoning, accurate graphs and calculations, the rubric and APA.

Graphs are delivered as images you can insert, with every axis and curve labeled.

Writers also keep a running glossary for your section, so terms such as marginal cost, price elasticity and deadweight loss are defined once and used the same way in every post, problem set and milestone. Instructors in economics courses notice when a student's vocabulary drifts from week to week, and a consistent glossary keeps the whole class reading as one person's work.

The first difficulty is the economics itself. Many health administration students have not taken economics before, and concepts such as elasticity, marginal cost and market equilibrium take practice. Problem sets that confuse a shift of a curve with a movement along it lose points quickly.

The second is applying textbook economics to health care. The interesting part of the course is where health care breaks the standard model, through insurance, information gaps and regulation, and posts that apply the model without noticing those breaks miss the point.

The third is graphs. Many assignments expect supply and demand diagrams showing a change, and drawing and explaining them clearly takes time.

The fourth is the final project, which asks for an economic analysis rather than a description of a problem, and students used to writing about health care in clinical or policy terms often struggle to frame it economically.

Because economics builds week by week, HCM 320 is best handed over before Module One, so the concepts and the final project's focus are set from the start. Mid-term handovers work as well: the current module comes first, then missed problem sets and milestones by weight.

The size of the job depends on your section's mix of problem sets, graphs, papers and project stages. Sections with weekly calculations and graphs carry more work than discussion-led ones.

A health care issue you care about, such as drug prices or hospital costs in your area, often makes the strongest final project.

You receive one price for the class before any work begins.

If your instructor posts announcements with extra readings or a recent article to discuss, forward them, because the writer will work them into the next post.