Right... so our starting point is to think of health care as one important area of welfare economics. Increasingly, we find that the health of their citizens represents a major priority for governments in different ways. We can think of health and health care in two ways. Firstly, responding to illness and disease with medicine, treatments, hospitals and so on. Secondly, we should think of health care as dealing with the prevention of disease, providing health education and helping people to stay healthy.