Reforming Health Care Systems brings together the work of leading economic scholars on the reform and development of the United Kingdom's National Health Service and the implications of this process for health care systems worldwide.It addresses important issues such as the financing of medical care, assessments of health care effectiveness, the need for rationing resources and the wider determinants of health in society. The contributors to this stimulating, thought-provoking volume discuss a breadth of topics and approaches. Placing the UK's health service in an international context, the authors also examine economic understandings of the health care market, the place of contracts and competition, capital and labour markets for health, health care funding and equity in the rationing of health care.

Students, researchers and policy makers will welcome Reforming Health Care Systems for challenging established views and beliefs in order to examine fundamental issues concerned with health care, how it should be delivered and how it should be financed.