Providing, financing and regulating health care

This chapter explores the public-private mix of three dimensions of providing, financing, and regulating health care. It examines typologies based on these dimensions. It discusses the public-private mix through the concepts of publicness and the mixed economy of welfare, before exploring studies based on the three dimensions. It concludes that despite an extensive literature, our knowledge of providing, financing and regulating health care remains fairly thin. It is difficult to find an accurate picture of recent trends, which is partly due to problems in clear definitions, criteria and operationalization of the independent variable of privatization. It is even more difficult to come to clear conclusions about the dependent variable of the effects of privatization. Moreover, there are particular gaps in our knowledge of both the level of, and effects of, privatization in health care systems, especially concerning regulation, on LMICs, and on how the three dimensions interact.