Regional economic security through the lens of sectoral components: substantiation of the priority role of healthcare

The article substantiates the interpretation of regional economic security as a system of sectoral components of the intertemporal sustainability of a territorial socio-economic system. The objective of the study is to develop criteria for identifying a priority sectoral component of regional economic security and to justify the special role of healthcare and compulsory health insurance in ensuring regional sustainability. The methodological basis includes systemic, reproductive and institutional approaches, supplemented by logical-theoretical, structural-functional and comparative-analytical methods. As a result, the content of a sectoral component of regional economic security is clarified, and the criteria for its priority status are proposed: systemic significance, an independent contour of threats, direct transmission of imbalances, institutional manageability and measurability. It is shown that healthcare and compulsory health insurance form a priority institutional-sectoral subsystem, since they reproduce population health, labor potential, demographic dynamics, quality of life and fiscal sustainability of the territory. The main conclusion is that healthcare imbalances are transformed into demographic, labor, budgetary, migration and value-based risks of regional scale, also affecting enterprise stability and the investment attractiveness of the regional environment.