FYI - new book edited by Alan Maynard which may be of interest to you. For those interested more information on the book can be found at 

http://www.radcliffe-oxford.com/books/bookdetail.asp?ISBN=1+85775+701+7

Best wishes

David McDaid
LSE Health and Social Care 

Publication date: Thursday, 17 March 2005.

Why do government reforms have limited success in improving the delivery of health care ?

A major new book, The Public Private Mix for Healthcare, provides an international perspective on the ideologies and inefficiencies  that shape health care reform.

Over twenty years after the publication of the original "Public-Private Mix "this new volume, edited by Professor Alan Maynard, University of York, brings together leading international experts on the funding and provision of health care.  

Professor Maynard argues: 
                "Throughout the world, health care systems are wrestling with common problems by adopting, abandoning and reintroducing discarded and unproven policies. Fundamental issues in public policy are ignored to garner votes by reform wheezes and patients' care is hazarded by avoidable deficiencies in health care delivery."

"plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose"

The re-cycling of failed policies worldwide, in private and in public institutions, does not controlling expenditure inflation, does not ensuring value for money for the payers of insurance premiums or taxpayers, and does not deliver care equitably to different social groups. 

For example, in the USA, "managed care" failed to create expenditure control and has been replaced by extensive use of user charges, a policy discarded a decade ago as a "failure" in preference to managed care. The fragmented health care systems in the USA provided some of the best health care in the world to the wealthy but for the less affluent the effects of genetic endowment, old age and misfortune in the labour market can bring penury and misery.

Likewise, in England health policy reforms are likely to return in a new guise. 
The Labour Government first abolished the Conservatives' NHS Hospital Trusts and GP fund holding and then re-invented and re-branded them as Foundation Trusts and practice level budgeting.

Individual chapters in this book examine the reform frenzy in health care markets worldwide and the similarities faced in policy challenges: Alan Maynard, Alan Williams, Cam Donaldson, Karen Gerard, Craig Mitton, and Rudolf Klein separately discuss various aspects of policy in the UK; Uwe Reinhardt writes on USA policies; Bob Evans and Marco Vujicic on Canada; Jane Hall and Elizabeth Savage on Australia; Nicholas Mays and Nancy Devlin on New Zealand; Kjeld MØller Pedersen Scandinavia; Martin Pfaff and Axel Olaf Kern on Germany; and Lise Rochaix and Laurence Hartmann on France.