ABSTRACT
This book has been written to give an insight into particular features of the UK's and USA's system of health care, with a view to supplementing the tools already available to those concerned with shaping and managing health services. This is far from being exclusively the province of professional managers. Implicit throughout the book has been the view that an overreliance on 'political' decision-making and 'cooperative behaviour' to achieve desired outcomes in health care amounts to little more than the unfettered use of political processes to determine matters which can be better settled by a mixture of market forces and clinical logic.
