Health Care Policy: Lessons from the Past and Issues of the Future

S. E. Berki

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1983, vol. 468, issue 1, 231-246

Abstract: Liberal distributional values, the increasingly powerful capacity of medicine to provide more and better care, and concern about the health hazards of an industrial society fueled the vast expansion of the health care sector during the last 20 years. That growth was facilitated by a growing economy. The current health policy debate at one level reexamines the distributional bases of entitlement programs, and at another seeks alternative resource allocation mechanisms to reduce the cost of health care. This article has two themes. First, distributional and allocational policies are shown to be intrinsically related, so that the health policy debate is fundamentally a clash between liberal and libertarian values. Second, the inexorable social forces driving the health care system are shown to be the aging of the population and the rapid expansion of technology. The resulting dynamics imply the further growth of the health sector, now in the environment of a sluggish economy. Future policies will have to struggle with how to ration scarce health resources and how to reorient the health care sector to the problems of the aged.

Date: 1983
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002716283468001016 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:468:y:1983:i:1:p:231-246

DOI: 10.1177/0002716283468001016

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().