Scott L. Greer, Margitta Mätzke,
"The New Health Politics of Austerity in Europe"
, in David Primrose, Rodney D. Loeppky, Robin Chang: The Routledge Handbook of the Political Economy of Health and Healthcare, Routledge, Milton Park et al., Seite(n) 404-415, 2024
Original Titel:
The New Health Politics of Austerity in Europe
Sprache des Titels:
Englisch
Original Buchtitel:
The Routledge Handbook of the Political Economy of Health and Healthcare
Original Kurzfassung:
While often presented as an agenda of realizing efficiency gains, austerity ? as we know after a generation of such policies ? is at its core a challenge to universalism. This chapter shows that one of the victims of austerity is diversity in health system governance. The great variety of power-sharing arrangements and dispersed authority in regulating and administering healthcare that has characterized the organizational landscape in European countries has given way to a more important role of central governments ? specifically, in assuming control and responsibility for healthcare delivery, notwithstanding their public pronouncements of decentralization and market autonomy. Once they have extended universal coverage to a population, governments are trapped in the tradeoff between quality universal healthcare and every other public expenditure or tax cut. This distributional politics drives central governments deeper and deeper into the micro-management of healthcare systems. With health policy closely intertwined with the fiscal policies of individual member-states, the scope of European Union health politics has long remained limited. It took the major disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, and concomitant enormous expansion of public health and civil protection budgets, to establish the Union as an active agent of intervention in health policy.
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