The pathologies of the United States health care regime

Philip Rocco and Alex Waddan

Chapter 21 in Research Handbook on Health Care Policy, 2024, pp 374-392 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: When compared to peer countries, the United States’ approach to health care provision yields systematically higher costs and worse outcomes for most of the population. Understanding these outcomes requires attention not to individual health policies, but to the broader U.S. health policy regime. Our chapter provides a field guide to this regime. What emerges from our analysis is an image of several institutional pathologies. Fragmented institutions laden with veto points that impede systemic reform and advantage well-organized groups. The absence of mass parties ensures that “preference outliers” dominate the policy arena. An anti-statist political culture, reinforced by policies that do not evidently advantage the median voter, tends to weaken public support for state intervention. Yet while these pathologies appear to impede comprehensive reforms, they also produce internal contradictions that threaten to destabilize the policy regime. These contradictions and vulnerabilities, we conclude, warrant greater attention from scholars of health policy.

Keywords: Business and Management; Development Studies; Economics and Finance; Politics and Public Policy Sociology and Social Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781800887565.00025 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

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:elg:eechap:20769_21

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com
sales@e-elgar.co.uk

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla (darrel@e-elgar.co.uk).