Growth in national health spending closely tracked growth in nominal gross domestic product (GDP) in 2010 and 2011, and health spending as a share of GDP remained stable from 2009 through 2011, at 17.9 percent (Micah et al., 2011).

Based on the above information, answer the following questions:

• Define the economic principle of opportunity cost.
• Locate current GDP expenditures and express the percentages in a graph or a chart.
• Explain whether spending 17.9% of GDP is too much or too little to spend on healthcare.
• Defend your position using the concept of opportunity cost and highlight specific GDP expenditures that are impacted by healthcare expenditure (opportunity cost).

As a supervisor for the hospital pharmacy that uses anintegrated delivery system (IDS), you are responsible forcommunicating with physicians about various topics such as policychanges, availability, and regulatory issues. You have beeninformed that a particular medication will be impacted bythird-party payer reimbursement schemes. You will need to write amemorandum to prescribing physicians discussing the unavailabilityof certain pharmaceuticalitems because of third-party payer reimbursementschemes.