210104 SE M7b: SpezialisierungsSE Topics in Health Policy & Governance (2014W)

Health care is considered an elementary social good in democratic welfare states, yet the ways in which health care is organized, funded, and provided differs across countries. In addition, demographic and technological developments as well as changing social demands have put health care systems under increasing pressures.
Given these distinct features of contemporary health policy, health care reforms are usually not produced by a unitary actor with adequate control over all required action resources. Rather, reforms are likely to be the result of the contextual interactions among many public and private actors, organized on different levels of the health policy system, each with their own understanding of the nature of the problem and the feasibility of particular solutions, each with their own normative preferences, and their own capabilities or action resources that may be employed to affect the outcome of actual health care reform policies.
In line with these general features of health policy and recent developments therein, this course approaches health care policies and politics as expressions of governance. Specifically, we will focus on the various concepts, theoretical models and methodological consequences of the disciplines of the political sciences and policy sciences and their relevance for analyzing and understanding health policy systems and health policy reform, as follows:

1. The context of health politics and policies in industrialized welfare states;
2. The actors involved in health policy processes; state & societal actors
3. The methodological and analytical aspects of comparative policy analysis, including more recent interpretive approaches;
4. The importance of institutional structures and policy regimes
5. The process of health policymaking and its outcomes.