W ith the election of Bill Clinton as presiden t , Americans have asked for renewed attention to domestic and economic policies. A critical part of the U.S. domestic front demanding attention is healthcare reform. However, the message voters sent Clinton on healthcare reform is far from clear. Several postelection public opinion surveys show that, although voters believed healthcare reform was ...

A.L. MANSON, N. CHAPMAN, Y. WEDATILAKE, M. BALIC, H. MARWAY, S.L. SENEVIRATNE and P. HOLLOWAY From the Department of Clinical Immunology, St Mary’s Hospital, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, London W2 1NY, Department of Clinical Pharmacology, St Mary’s Hospital, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, London W2 1PG, Department of Chemical Pathology, St Mary’s Hospital, Imperial College Hea...

tary Working Group on Pensions published a “sketch” containing almost all the essential elements of the reform. The working group was formed at the end of 1991 as the new nonsocialist government took office, following the publication, debate, and official comments on a parliamentary pension commission’s final report on the problems of the old pension system that was published in 1990. The refor...

Forest and colleagues have persuasively made the case that policy capacity is a fundamental prerequisite to health reform. They offer a comprehensive life-cycle definition of policy capacity and stress that it involves much more than problem identification and option development. I would like to offer a Canadian perspective. If we define health reform as re-orienting the health system from acut...

New governance practices associated wit the modernisation of health systems within Europe focus on equipping health consumers with more information and power in their interactions with clinicians. This paper uses material on health care reform in Britain and Germany to highlight ways in which consumerism is refracted through different institutional histories and current political projects. Thes...

This article analyzes the historical and contemporary development of the Argentine health care system from the viewpoint of equity, a principle which is not explicitly mentioned in the system's founding documents. However, other values can be identified such as universal care, accessibility, and solidarity, which are closely related to equity. Nevertheless, the political dynamics characterizing...

This paper reports on a re-evaluation of the German health care reform of 1997. A previous evaluation found a limited effect of a 4.4 percent reduction of the number of doctor visits in a sample of pharmacy customers. The re-evaluation based on a representative household survey, the German Socio-Economic Panel, yields a much larger effect. The paper uses this case study to discuss the methods a...

From the moment I took office, the central challenge we have confronted as a nation has been to recover and rebuild from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. We’ve taken extraordinary steps to repair the immediate damage and lay the foundation for an economy built to last. And a critical first step on this journey has been taking action to restore health care as a basic pillar ...