The political economy of health and healthcare. The rise of the patient citizen

The healthcare sector is one of the fastest growing areas of social and public spending worldwide, and it is expected to increase its government shares of GDP in the near future. Truly global in its scope, this book present a unified, structured understanding of how the design of a country’s health institutions influence its healthcare activities and outcomes. Building on the ‘public choice’ tradition in political economy, the authors explore how patient-citizens interact with their country’s political institutions to determine the organisation of the health system. The book discusses a number of institutional influences of a health system, such as federalism, the nature of collective action, electoral competition, constitutional designs, political ideologies, the welfare effects of corruption and lobbying and, more generally, the dynamics of change.