Europe's Health for Sale

Europe's Health for Sale

Markets are a more expensive way to organise health care. They are less efficient, less equitable and less accountable to the wider public than planned, publicly funded systems: all of the evidence confirms this view.  So why are marketising reforms continuing, even in the midst of today’s dramatic onslaught on public sector spending?
 
Taking examples from Britain, Germany, Greece, Turkey, Spain and elsewhere, this book sets out to explain why profitable services are being contracted out – and other services put at risk – by the expansion of the private sector. It shows that the attraction of this type of market reform for private sector providers is that it funnels generous profits from the public purse and social insurance into the hands of private companies.
 
The papers were presented at a 2009 conference of the International Association of Health Policy in Europe, hosted at Coventry University: but the issues are just as relevant and immediate today.
 
Europe’s Health for Sale? aims to put fresh arguments and evidence in the hands of those who are challenging and resisting similar policies around the world.

John Lister has been a prominent and outspoken health campaigner, as Information Director of London Health Emergency, for over twenty-seven years. He is also Senior Lecturer in Health Journalism at Coventry University. His books include: Health Policy Reform – Driving the Wrong Way? (Middlesex University Press, 2005) and The NHS After 60 – for Patients or Profits? (Middlesex University Press, 2008).