Planned markets and public competition - Richard B Saltman

The health policy debate in Northern Europe is increasingly focused on the question of introducing competition into publicly operated health delivery systems. The potential advantages and disadvantages of such a shift have come to dominate discussion among not only academics but also politicians, adminstrators, and now physicians and patients as well. "Competition" has, not surprisingly, proved to be far from simple to implement in practice and many key questions surrounding its implementation in Northern European health systems remain to be answered. This book develops a new conceptual framework of "planned markets" which will help policymakers and health service professionals to place narrow economic problems into the broader social and political context that they reflect. The authors present several different types of planned market models from Britain, Sweden and Finland and argue that the "planned market" policy paradigm will strongly influence the future of publicly operated health systems throughout the whole of Europe.