WHY ARE NATIONAL HEALTH CARE SYSTEMS DIFFERENT?

National health systems organize and regulate two types of public policies: first, as any social policy would, they transfer income, from rich to poor and healthy to sick, as well as from patients to health care providers. Second, they regulate the production and delivery of health, an essentially private but hard-to-monitor output. Health systems thus understandably vary from one country to the next according to objective factors such as income inequality as well as subjective ones such as aversion for inequality. This article is a first step toward modeling these choices made by different countries on the organization of their health system. Theoretical models are surveyed and the choice of dependent variable to capture the organization of a health care system is discussed.