Introduction

Since the middle of the 1980s, health care reform has been one of the top policy initiatives of most Western industrialized states. A new wave of reform has emerged that focuses on harnessing competition to more efficiently achieve social justice ends. This book analyzes this wave of health care reform and compares two types of competition-oriented reform models-internal market reform and managed competition reform. These models are looked at in the context of their implementation in the UK, New Zealand, the US, and the Netherlands. This book tries to determine which reform model best solves the complex optimization problem of how to strike a balance between individual needs and societal interests and more generally between equity and efficiency.