Bringing together leading academics worldwide, this collection compares and critically examines the ways in which different countries are regulating healthcare in general, and health professions in particular, in the interest of users and the wider public.

This volume, developed by the Observatory together with OECD, provides an overall conceptual framework for understanding and applying strategies aimed at improving quality of care. Crucially, it summarizes available evidence on different quality strategies and provides recommendations for their implementation. This book is intended to help policy-makers to understand concepts of quality and to support them to evaluate single strategies and combinations of strategies.

There are significant variations in how healthcare systems and health professionals are regulated globally. One feature that they increasingly have in common is an emphasis on the value of including members of the public in quality assurance processes. While many argue that this will help better serve the public interest, others question how far the changing regulatory reform agenda is still dominated by medical interests. Bringing together leading academics worldwide, this collection compares and critically examines the ways in which different countries are regulating healthcare in general, and health professions in particular, in the interest of users and the wider public. It is the first book in the Sociology of Health Professions series.

"The Nation has lost sight of its public health goals and has allowed the system of public health to fall into 'disarray'," from The Future of Public Health. This startling book contains proposals for ensuring that public health service programs are efficient and effective enough to deal not only with the topics of today, but also with those of tomorrow. In addition, the authors make recommendations for core functions in public health assessment, policy development, and service assurances, and identify the level of government--federal, state, and local--at which these functions would best be handled.

Regulation shapes all aspects of America's fragmented health care industry. While the health and lives of patients as well as almost one-sixth of the national economy depend on its effectiveness, health care regulation in America is bewilderingly complex. 'Health Care Regulation in America' is a guide to this regulatory maze.

President Clinton's health care reform proposals of 1993 represented the most far-reaching program of social engineering attempted in the United States since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. Under the guise of reforming the health care system, the Clinton plan would have herded almost all Americans under age sixty-five into large, government-sponsored health insurance purchasing alliances that would have contracted with insurers to offer a standard set of benefits at regulated prices. The plan came under fire from both Republicans and Democrats, including moderates from both parties, but it soon became apparent that what doomed it was a public unwilling to trust government to manage their health care. The critical literature has failed to offer a cogent analysis of why government control of health care does not work. American Health Care delivers that analysis. This volume examines why untoward consequences usually follow when government sets out to do good things. The contributors demonstrate how hospital rate regulation raises hospital prices, that "no-fault" medical malpractice increases the occurrence of faulty medicine, and that FDA regulation is a major cause for the escalating cost of new drugs. Part 1, trace the genesis of Medicare and its later developments and argue the consumer advantages of medical savings accounts and written health contracts. Part 2, explore the fallacies of antitrust policies that serve the interests of competitors, attack community rating for making health insurance unaffordable to large numbers of young workers. Part 3, contains a powerful critique of the FDA for withholding vital information on the health benefits of aspirin and shows how HMOs and other plans have caused pharmaceutical marketing to shift its focus from medical effectiveness to cost effectiveness. The final section explores how the private sector is improving in the areas of regulating physician and other health professional fees and the supply and quality of health professionals. American Health Care proposes reasonable balances between government and market options for in supply of health services. Without denying the need for some governmental action, the contributors show how far the market can go farther in performing critical functions in the health care industry. This volume will be important reading for health policymakers, economists, and health care professionals. Roger Feldman is professor at the Institute for Health Services Research, University of Minnesota. Mark V. Pauly is professor in the Department of Health Care Systems of the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

How do we know when physicians practice medicine safely? Can we trust doctors to discipline their own? What is a proper role of experts in a democracy? In the Public Interest raises these provocative questions, using medical licensing and discipline to advocate for a needed overhaul of how we decide public good in a society dominated by private interest groups. Throughout the twentieth century, American physicians built a powerful profession, but their drive toward professional autonomy has made outside observers increasingly concerned about physicians’ ability to separate their own interests from those of the general public. Ruth Horowitz traces the history of medical licensure and the mechanisms that democratic societies have developed to certify doctors to deliver critical services. Combining her skills as a public member of medical licensing boards and as an ethnographer, Horowitz illuminates the workings of the crucial public institutions charged with maintaining public safety. She demonstrates the complex agendas different actors bring to board deliberations, the variations in the board authority across the country, the unevenly distributed institutional resources available to board members, and the difficulties non-physician members face as they struggle to balance interests of the parties involved. In the Public Interest suggests new procedures, resource allocation, and educational initiatives to increase physician oversight. Horowitz makes the case for regulations modeled after deliberative democracy that promise to open debates to the general public and allow public members to take a more active part in the decision-making process that affects vital community interests.