Markets and Health Care: A Comparative Analysis

A growing reliance on market disciplines and incentives characterised health care reform strategies in many countries in the 1990s, yet the country which relies most heavily on private health care - the U.S.A. - is the most expensive in the world and still fails to deliver affordable health care to millions of its citizens. This apparent paradox is the starting point in the discussions presnted in this book which also:

• Explores the spread of promarket, procompetitive ideas in health care reform against a background of changes in the global economy
• Analyses the reasons why these ideas became so influential, and with what results, through a comparative analysis of health care developments in seven advanced capitalist democracies
• Critically analyses the theoretical underpinnings for market-based health care reform strategies like managed competition
• Argues that market experiment in health care throws lights on the process of international lesson-drawing in public policy, which has a wider application than the health policy field