ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to compare the health policies pursued in Germany, Great Britain, France, Denmark and the Netherlands from the perspective of the neo-Weberian public management model. A brief presentation of health care systems in individual countries with a vast experience of public management reform will be followed by a discussion of their performance. The analysed health care systems, even though they are based on the same models, show significant differences both in terms of the organisation and financing of health services and the results obtained. In most analysed countries, decentralisation constitutes an important aspect of health policy. Only Denmark with its preference for centralisation and concentration provides an interesting counterpoint. This can be explained by the desire to take advantage of the economies of scale and thereby contain the costs of services, which remains one of the top health policy priorities in all the countries studied.
