Health care law-making in Central and Eastern Europe : review of a legal-theoretical model

Most of the European countries are confronted with health care system reforms. In Central and Eastern Europe, however, the countries face specific challenges. Whereas "socialist" governments traditionally have been deeply involved in all facets of health care, the general process of initiated market-oriented reforms has also affected the nature and scope of government intervention in health care. Stimulated by the successes of concepts such as decentralisation, deregulation, and privatisation in order to create a more flexible market economy, policy-makers also began to apply such notions to the health care sector. The experiences in the early 1990s however, revealed certain devastating effects of transposing the general concept of market competition to the field of health care. One valuable lesson of those developments was that liberalising relations in health care necessitates a certain degree of government intervention. Furthermore, the nature and scope of Central and Eastem European health care reforms differed from country to country with no uniform "blueprint" for reform, derived from emulating Western European experiences, being readily available. Nevertheless, previous experiences in reforming health care may provide us with valuable lessons. Their significanee needs, nonetheless, to be reviewed in accordance with specific national setting

• View at Worldcat

Free Full Text ( Final Version , 13mb )