Health Economics: How Became an Economic Object

What if health is not a natural state but a historical construction-continuously produced through the progressive externalization of our vital functions into technologies, industries, and institutions?This book proposes a radical paradigm shift: health economics has spent sixty years asking "how should we allocate health resources?" without ever asking the more fundamental question-"how did health become the kind of thing that can be allocated?"Drawing on the Theory of Health Externalization, this work reveals that the healthcare market is not a neutral arena for meeting pre-existing needs, but a platform for exchanging externalized life functions. The six emancipations of health externalization-from the stethoscope's externalization of hearing (1816) to genomic data's externalization of life itself-map directly onto six layers of market formation, each with its own economic logic, value source, and central issues.The book deploys the pharmacological dialectic as its core analytical framework: every health technology is simultaneously remedy and poison. Antibiotics cure infections and generate resistance. ICUs save lives and prolong dying. AI extends cognition and erodes clinical skills. The economic mission is not to eliminate this tension-which is structural-but to navigate it wisely.Through historical narrative, political economy critique, and institutional design, the book argues that health externalization generates both emancipation (life extension, suffering alleviation) and alienation (overmedicalization, health anxiety, data exploitation, class stratification). The response is re-internalization: the critical appropriation of technological achievements into our own cultivated health capacities.The ultimate question: In an age when health is increasingly becoming an economic object, how can human beings still remain human?This is not merely a new theory of health economics-it is a fundamental reorientation of the discipline's ontological foundations, epistemological commitments, and normative aspirations.