ABSTRACT

In Chapter 8, this study is concerned with the major shift in financial strategy in the health care sector during the economic reform from 1979 onwards, centering on the question of how sovereign planners introduced user charges to a variety of health care services, and how they deliberately adopted franchising as a funding source for the delivery of medical care. The chapter endeavors to demonstrate that the policy of franchising was originally intended to cope with the issue of financing health care in general and funding basic curative care in particular, but it has brought not only unanticipated but also undesirable policy consequences at the expenses of affordable care. The chapter assesses some theoretical alternatives to deal with such unintended consequences in light of various cases of non-compliances in the health care sector.