FRINK Linked Data Fragments server

Matches in SemOpenAlex for { <https://semopenalex.org/work/W2082025050> ?p ?o ?g. }

• W2082025050 endingPage "1554" @default.
• W2082025050 startingPage "1553" @default.
• W2082025050 abstract "Book Review Health AffairsVol. 29, No. 8: Lessons From Around The World Only 2 Stars For This Tour Of 6 Nations’ Health ReformsMarc Roberts Affiliations Marc Roberts ( [email protected] ) is a professor of political economy in the Department of Health Policy and Management and the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard School of Public Health, in Boston, Massachusetts. As a member of the World Bank’s Flagship Program on Health Sector Reform and Sustainable Financing for the past decade, he has given courses and seminars on health-sector reform in more than thirty countries. PUBLISHED:August 2010Free Accesshttps://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2010.0541AboutSectionsView PDFPermissions ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsDownload Exhibits TOPICSCase studiesHealth reformThis book is simultaneously interesting and frustrating. It reviews in some detail the health reform efforts in six intriguing countries that are all small, relatively rich, and somewhat isolated: Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, and Taiwan. Four of the six have a population of under eight million people, while the per capita gross domestic product of each country is above $25,000. In recent years, these countries—which the editors categorize as being “health reforms ‘under the radar screen’”—have adopted a variety of fascinating changes in financing, paying for, and organizing health care, which are similar yet different.They have done so in quite different political systems, all coping with some of the same worldwide problems such as rising health costs and expectations, aging populations, and new technologies. Thus, this volume seems to be ideally poised to employ the methodology of comparative case studies and “historical institutionalism”—which the authors invoke—to increase our understanding of the causes and consequences of health care reform.But despite numerous fascinating details and anecdotes, which specialists in this field or those interested in one of the specific countries will appreciate, the book fails to deliver on its promise. It suffers from having no common set of concepts or theoretical framework to develop the case studies, which neither discuss the same variables nor evaluate the same hypotheses. In fact, the case studies do not even cover the same range of topics and issues. The editors’ introduction gestures toward concepts and theories, but these are used sparingly, if at all, by chapter authors.The book views changes in the six countries’ health care systems, I believe correctly, as both dependent and independent variables—that is, both as a consequence of political processes and as a cause of important outcomes such as health status. The case studies do try to give an account of how social, economic, and political forces and institutions shaped the reforms in each country. Yet they do much less well at explaining how these reforms influenced health-sector outcomes. Moreover, no consistent set of categories is employed to describe root causes, system characteristics, or ultimate outcomes. Only two of the six case studies—of Singapore and Taiwan—even try to link reforms with outcomes. And they do not use a common framework in doing so.Any attempt to treat policy as a dependent variable should be animated by some systematic comparative analysis of the role of major political stakeholders in policy design. Yet the volume misses that opportunity. In New Zealand, we learn, doctors were relatively weak politically, while the Dutch approach gave near-veto power to doctors and other interest groups. Yet with the case-study writers proceeding largely in isolation, there is no real comparative discussion of how these differences manifested themselves in different reform priorities.In a way, these analytical failures spring from the failure to begin each case study by clearly defining the “problem” that each country faced. If differences in values and politics influenced those different definitions, such relationships could and should have been discussed explicitly. That point of departure, in turn, would have allowed the authors to systematically diagnose the causes of each nation’s problems. And with such diagnoses in hand, the authors could have not only described the course of reform in each country, but also evaluated its reasonableness against what is known about the relationship between health-system characteristics and various dimensions of health-system performance.What do we have instead? The editors argue at the end of the volume that the case studies prove that values matter, history matters, and institutions matter. There are interesting accounts of the role of the Histradrut Labor Federation in the evolution of Israeli insurance schemes, and the role of the Dekker Commission (named after its chairman, Wisse Dekker, a former chief executive officer of the electronics firm Phillips) in providing broad direction for reform in the Netherlands.I had not fully appreciated the role of popular referendums in Switzerland, and I am intrigued by the suggestion that economic success has led Singapore’s citizens to so trust their “sagacious” government that it can impose financing burdens on them that the citizens of the other countries discussed in this volume would roundly reject. But given the obvious deep knowledge of each country by the authors of the case studies, a more ambitious and extensive effort at coherent and parallel analysis—and a common theoretical approach—could have told us so much more. Loading Comments... Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. DetailsExhibitsReferencesRelated Article Metrics History Published online 1 August 2010 Information Project HOPE—The People-to-People Health Foundation, Inc. PDF download" @default.
• W2082025050 created "2016-06-24" @default.
• W2082025050 creator A5045013532 @default.
• W2082025050 date "2010-08-01" @default.
• W2082025050 modified "2023-10-18" @default.
• W2082025050 title "Only 2 Stars For This Tour Of 6 Nations’ Health Reforms" @default.
• W2082025050 doi "https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2010.0541" @default.
• W2082025050 hasPublicationYear "2010" @default.
• W2082025050 type Work @default.
• W2082025050 sameAs 2082025050 @default.
• W2082025050 citedByCount "0" @default.
• W2082025050 crossrefType "journal-article" @default.
• W2082025050 hasAuthorship W2082025050A5045013532 @default.
• W2082025050 hasBestOaLocation W20820250501 @default.
• W2082025050 hasConcept C114350782 @default.
• W2082025050 hasConcept C127598652 @default.
• W2082025050 hasConcept C160735492 @default.
• W2082025050 hasConcept C162324750 @default.
• W2082025050 hasConcept C17744445 @default.
• W2082025050 hasConcept C2908647359 @default.
• W2082025050 hasConcept C47344431 @default.
• W2082025050 hasConcept C50522688 @default.
• W2082025050 hasConcept C71924100 @default.
• W2082025050 hasConcept C99454951 @default.
• W2082025050 hasConceptScore W2082025050C114350782 @default.
• W2082025050 hasConceptScore W2082025050C127598652 @default.
• W2082025050 hasConceptScore W2082025050C160735492 @default.
• W2082025050 hasConceptScore W2082025050C162324750 @default.
• W2082025050 hasConceptScore W2082025050C17744445 @default.
• W2082025050 hasConceptScore W2082025050C2908647359 @default.
• W2082025050 hasConceptScore W2082025050C47344431 @default.
• W2082025050 hasConceptScore W2082025050C50522688 @default.
• W2082025050 hasConceptScore W2082025050C71924100 @default.
• W2082025050 hasConceptScore W2082025050C99454951 @default.
• W2082025050 hasIssue "8" @default.
• W2082025050 hasLocation W20820250501 @default.
• W2082025050 hasOpenAccess W2082025050 @default.
• W2082025050 hasPrimaryLocation W20820250501 @default.
• W2082025050 hasRelatedWork W1991331685 @default.
• W2082025050 hasRelatedWork W2005590473 @default.
• W2082025050 hasRelatedWork W2009997032 @default.
• W2082025050 hasRelatedWork W2028790704 @default.
• W2082025050 hasRelatedWork W2148733774 @default.
• W2082025050 hasRelatedWork W2188057806 @default.
• W2082025050 hasRelatedWork W2319110276 @default.
• W2082025050 hasRelatedWork W2484306259 @default.
• W2082025050 hasRelatedWork W2490235338 @default.
• W2082025050 hasRelatedWork W2810716720 @default.
• W2082025050 hasVolume "29" @default.
• W2082025050 isParatext "false" @default.
• W2082025050 isRetracted "false" @default.
• W2082025050 magId "2082025050" @default.
• W2082025050 workType "article" @default.