Brian Biles

Reconsidering the Role of Competition in Health Care Markets: Introduction

In recent years there has been a surge of interest in reforming the organization and delivery of health systems by relying more on market competition. Although much of the impetus has emanated from the United States, the phenomenon is worldwide (Brown 1998). Recognizing the significance of these trends, in May 1998 we organized an international conference in Berlin on “Reconsidering the Role of Competition in Health Care Markets.” The two-day meeting was jointly sponsored by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, and the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB; in English, the Berlin Science Center for Social Research). The conference, which was hosted by the WZB, included thirty-one individuals from ten countries. This special section presents a summary of the main issues on which the meeting focused, followed by ten brief reports on the interplay of markets and government in specific developed countries. It concludes with a short analysis of the implications of the forgoing material on health care policy internationally and two commentaries that bring additional perspective to these issues.