Take My SNHU IHP 620 Class

IHP 620 gives future health administrators the economic reasoning behind the decisions they will face: why prices vary so widely between hospitals, why insurance changes how much care people use, why some markets have too few providers and what policy can and cannot fix.

The microeconomic modules usually start with scarcity, opportunity cost and marginal analysis, then supply and demand applied to health services. Students study price elasticity, for instance why demand for emergency care barely moves with price while demand for elective procedures does, and how insurance lowers the price patients see and raises use, the problem economists call moral hazard. Market failure gets close attention: asymmetric information between doctors and patients, adverse selection in insurance markets, externalities from vaccination, and market power in concentrated hospital markets.

The financing modules cover how care is paid for: private insurance, Medicare and Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, and payment methods such as fee-for-service, DRGs, capitation, bundled payments and value-based programs, each with different incentives.

The macroeconomic and policy modules look at national health spending and its growth, health care's share of GDP, the labor market for clinicians, international comparisons and the tools of policy, from price regulation to competition and cost-effectiveness analysis. Graded work typically blends discussions, analysis papers, cases and a policy or market analysis project.

Your syllabus, the readings and each guidelines-and-rubric document come first, and then a short conversation about where you work. Economics lands differently for the administrator of a rural hospital that lives on Medicare rates than for a revenue cycle manager at a large system negotiating with commercial plans, and the papers are written from your seat.

Every module's post is ready when the module unlocks. When the topic is elasticity, the post might show why higher copays for brand-name drugs push patients toward generics but also lead some to stop taking a needed medicine. When it is market power, it might walk through a regional hospital merger in which prices rose with no measurable gain in quality. Comments under classmates' posts add a figure from the national spending data, a payer incentive they overlooked or a policy that changes the picture.

Analysis papers take a real question and answer it with CMS National Health Expenditure data, KFF surveys, CBO and MedPAC reports and peer-reviewed economics research. Supply and demand or cost curve graphs appear wherever they make the argument clearer, labeled and explained.

Case write-ups stay inside the facts the case gives. Feedback from your instructor on one paper shapes the next, so the economic reasoning tightens as the term goes on.

IHP 620 is handled by health economists and finance professionals with graduate degrees in economics, health policy or business who have worked for hospitals, health plans, consulting firms and government agencies.

They have modeled payment changes, analyzed market competition and built cost-effectiveness estimates, so their papers apply theory to cases the way practitioners do.

Each paper also passes a second economist, who checks that every term is used the way economists use it and that the data are the latest release.

Graphs and tables are built cleanly and explained in the text, and all sources are cited in APA.

The first stumbling block is the vocabulary of economics: marginal cost, elasticity, deadweight loss, moral hazard, adverse selection, monopsony, opportunity cost. Many administrators have never studied economics formally, and posts that use these terms loosely lose points.

The second is graphs. Supply and demand diagrams, shifts versus movements along a curve and cost curves are standard in economics papers, and drawing and explaining them correctly takes practice.

The third is moving from theory to health care. The course's point is that health care markets break textbook assumptions, and students must explain why, with examples, rather than applying a simple market model.

The fourth is policy analysis. Rubrics ask students to weigh the economic effects of a policy, such as price transparency rules or site-neutral payment, on patients, providers, payers and government, with evidence. Payment methods add a layer of their own, since each one creates incentives that must be traced through to behavior.

Economic reasoning in IHP 620 builds on itself. Elasticity returns in the insurance modules, market failure returns in the policy modules, and payment incentives return in the project, so the papers are written with the later modules in mind from the start.

Price reflects how many analysis papers and cases your section sets and how large the closing policy or market project is. The modules on market failure, payment methods and policy usually carry the heaviest papers.

If you join after the term has begun, the module that is open now is written first; the posts and papers you already submitted are read beforehand so the setting and tone carry on unchanged.

One figure covers all remaining work, and each item on it shows the day it reaches you. A live question at your organization, such as a payer negotiation or a new competitor nearby, can become the project, using public information only.