ABSTRACT
In 1999, the newly elected centre-left governments of Britain and Germany announced
similar and in part jointly developed reform projects under the banner of the ‘Third
Way’, a central element of which was the use of the market to attain social democratic
goals.1 One key area of the Third Way, of which others are discussed elsewhere in this
volume, was health policy. In this context, ‘Third Way’ thinking rejected the belief in
the perceived ‘knightish’ behaviour of the health care providers (that is, public-spirited
altruism), which remained prevalent among ‘traditional’ social democrats. Like conser-
vatives and liberals, the ‘Third Way’ assumes health care providers to be ‘knavish’, that
is in some way self-interested. Additionally, ‘Third Way’ social democrats agree with
the goal of conservatives and liberals on the desirability of enlarging the scope for
decision-making by the recipients of health services. However, while ‘modern’ social
democrats agree with the centre-right parties on the use of the market to optimise the
health system, they still follow socialist goals like social equality.2 At the same time,
the ‘Third Way’ lacked any general definition of how ‘equality’ and other goals
could be translated into health policy or of how this translation should deal with the
problem of different national health systems.
