ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the effi ciency of cost-control policies in healthcare systems through an analysis of healthcare systems in three selected countries: the United States, France and Japan. These were chosen because their healthcare systems are well documented, have complete statistics and are quite diff erent from each other, thus covering a wide range of cost-control policies. First, I describe the current state of the three selected healthcare systems and try to evaluate their sustainability. I then investigate the detail of the institutional setup of the given systems, and analyse the actual effi ciency of named control policies through a cross-country comparison. Finally, I link the results of the analysis of the cost-control policies to the sustainability of each of the three healthcare systems, thus attempting to explain how sustainable each of the systems is.
