The key argument of this commentary is that patient choice has a broader meaning than suggested by consumerist choice models. In increasingly marketized health care systems with diversified and knowledge-based service arrangements, patients are continuously obliged to choose insurers, physicians or hospitals and treatments—whether they like it or not. However, health care users refer to a wide ...

Introduction Only a small portion of today's existing research has made use of rigorous empirical methods to convincingly isolate the impact on the health sector of the new provider-payment arrangements from those which resulted from other changes occurring at the same time. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, several transitional countries in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECA)...