ABSTRACT
Australia has a pluralist health care system, with a history of government control, intervention, financing, and service provision combined with substantial private professional practice and private for-profit and not-for-profit institutional provision. The complexity of the sectors, complicated by a federal/state system of separate and overlapping responsibilities, has produced a health care system that one would hardly wish to replicate, yet it enjoys the support of the majority of the population. Early origins of the Australian population are historically British, with a small, dispersed Aboriginal population; recent European and even more recent Asian migration have contributed to a multicultural society, which has nevertheless retained and even expanded a British expectation of government provision and responsibility for delivery of heath care.
