The public-private frontier: The land of Oz

Abstract

There are two problematics of health care reform facing most Western industrialized countries: the conservative problematic involves considering the merits of private and public health care services, even to the extent of revisiting policies that create first and second class health care citizens. The progressive problematic requires rethinking ways to extend community based health care. These problematics represent the two prospective ideological axes for health care reform in the industrialized world over the next twenty years. The best way of describing these ideologies is conservative and progressive, not because they neatly fit with mainstream political models but because conservative h..