Comparative Health Systems

Catalog description

What would the best healthcare system look like? How would you know it is the best? What systems in wealthy nations today come close to matching this ideal? We begin this class with short documentary films that cover some of issues raised by these questions. We read and discuss articles about conventional health system models around the world and alternative perspectives for studying them and evaluating their performance. We discuss how so much of the literature draws on selective evidence to evaluate health care systems in the U.S. and abroad. Finally, we discuss different approaches to the empirical analysis of health system performance, and examine the extent to which the available evidence supports or refutes widely shared views of different health care systems. In this final part of the class, using zoom, we will converse with experts in the U.S., Canada, France, Switzerland and Israel.