Health sector regulation – understanding the range of responses from Government
Abstract
HEALTH POLICY AND PLANNING; 15(4): 347â348 © Oxford University Press 2000 Editorial Health sector regulation â understanding the range of responses from Government NEIL SÃDERLUND1 AND VIROJ TANGCHAROENSATHIEN2 1Senior Researcher, Centre for Health Policy, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, and 2Senior Research Scholar Programme, Health Systems Research Institute and Thailand Research Fund, Thailand There has been much mention of the factors behind recent growth of the private health sector in developing countries. Global ideological shifts, pressure from international agencies and ballooning public sector debt have all played their role. We sometimes forget, however, that private provision of medical care preceded the existence of the World Bank by a good few millennia. Perhaps a more pertinent question is why do Governments choose the ways that they do to intervene in health care markets. Virtually all developing country governments have used some degree of direct state funding or provision of health care as their primary device to eliminate the health access inequities and inefï¬ciencies that existed as a result of purely private access to care. In most countries, these still form the backbone of the health system. Failure of state health care systems to meet all health care needs has