This article aims to present the findings of a study on health as a socio-economic category and a crucial element of human capital. Health plays a significant role in determining the potential productivity of individuals and shaping the quality of labor supply in the economy. In carrying out this study, the authors solved several tasks, including analyzing the evolution of the concept and meaning of human capital in the context of its structure, studying the objective conditionality of considering health in it and substantiating the need to perceive health comprehensively, including as a socio-economic category.

The methodology for the study was developed by optimally combining different methods, such as the unity of historical and logical aspects in socio-economic research, the descriptive-analytical method, and the synthesis of its results. The research also structured the problem, prioritized some points of the research process, systematized the results of identification, selection, and segregation of information, and generalized them to create a logical conclusion.

Throughout their research, the authors have identified the basic elements that determine the economic and social aspects of health. This enables health to be considered as a socio-economic category on par with other similar categories. The authors have established that health, as an economic category in the individual aspect, is determined by the expenses incurred by a person, family, enterprise, and society as a whole, for the preservation, restoration, and prevention of health. In the social aspect, health is an economic category that is associated with the losses incurred by society from diseases, injuries, disabilities, premature mortality, and “savings” costs on public health, both by the state and employers, and other participants in healthcare financing. As a social category, health can be defined both individually and socially. The individual definition is based on a person’s social status under which he/she effectively performs its social functions. The public health as a social category reflects the ability of society (team) members to fully perform functions that are related to its further development and to lead a lifestyle that ensures the preservation, strengthening, and development of this ability.

Therefore, health is an extremely important economic and social category, which expresses the relationship regarding the need for its financing to preserve, strengthen, and multiply as an element and factor of high-quality human capital – a determinant of the high efficiency of enterprise operation, the branch, and the state. This, in turn, forms its stable competitiveness in the relevant markets.