This course discusses two major health policy challenges facing our world today: reforming healthcare systems and securing access to medicine to patients around the world. The course has two sections: the first one discusses the sociopolitical and economic foundation of healthcare systems, familiarizes students with current challenges facing these systems and provides critical knowledge and skills to effectively design and implement successful health policy reforms. The section focuses on health system structure, financing, organization and regulation; on system reform process; and on challenges in pharmaceutical policy (pricing, reimbursement, access to medicine and pharmaceutical budget control). Section two uses the Case-Based Learning methodology to familiarize students with US and international health systems and provides students the opportunity to use learning from section one to propose sound policy reforms. During this section, students will also have the chance to discuss health systems issues with potential guest speaker(s) who has (ve) lead reform(s) in his/her country.
