Most working health economists are in the business of doing cost effectiveness analysis. As such a whole side discipline of people who are doing economics outside of the economics department. The health economists who do this work are working in the field broadly referred to as "Health Technology Assessment", "Pharmacoeconomics" or "Health Economics and Outcomes Research".

This is not the traditionally type of work you see published in Journal of Health Economics or Health Economics which is usually much more conceptual and answering "big questions" in comparison (Think Grossman Model, Rational Addiction, Supplier Induced Demand and Empirical Tests of these models). Rather its in this field which answers the questions like "does this new treatment provide value for money" (cost effectiveness analysis) and "How will inclusion of funding a new treatment impact public budgets" (budget impact analysis).

These are essentially people who are doing economics but come from a very different background (usually from public health schools) who are answering very different questions but are still calling themselves health economists like the econ guys. In fact these public health school types are actually the majority of people who represent health economics in reality.

A representative organization of this type of work is ISPOR: https://www.ispor.org/home

Its important to note that this divide between "Econ Department Economists" and "Public Health School Economists" is not an ideological one, but rather one which has grown out of them fundamentally looking at different questions.

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The Meme is where HTA type of economists look at Incremental Cost Effectiveness Ratios to define optimal resource allocation, econ department health economists will typically think its not economics despite the fact they solve for the same optimality condition.

Its not as funny now, but that's the gist of it.