This book provides the first in-depth study of healthcare reforms in post-communist Eastern Europe. Combining insights from comparative politics and public policy analysis, it examines health reforms in Slovenia, the Czech Republic, and Poland between 1989 and 2019. The book argues that the post-communist transformation of healthcare policy has entailed a process of policy learning, and that the countries' reform pathways were shaped by a series of initiatives aimed at applying market-oriented policy ideas in healthcare. The success of these initiatives has been influenced by three factors: policy legacies, political competition, and institutional configurations. The book offers a novel comparison of health reform in the region and policy changes more generally. It will appeal to scholars and students of public policy, health policy, and European politics.
Rather than merely assessing how partisan politics, institutions, and professional interests affected post-communist reform trajectories, Popic's study is based on a novel and original argument emphasizing the importance of endogenous factors, such as policy learning and policymakers' prior exposure to experiences with market mechanisms, in shaping policy change. The book is a substantive and timely addition to an understudied dimension of the restructuring process of post-communist welfare state: the field of public healthcare.
Evelyne Hübscher, Central European University, Austria
After the fall of communism, healthcare marketization invested Eastern European countries, often to the detriment of equality and fairness. The book reveals that such wave of reforms generated a variety of marketized healthcare arrangements across countries. Challenging existing interpretations, it conceptualizes policy change as an endogenous process based on "learning", thus leading the reader to a fascinating journey into how the never-ending "ballet" between ideas, institutions and interests shaped the politics of reform and, ultimately, policy outputs.
Matteo Jessoula, University of Milan, Italy
This book provides the first in-depth study of healthcare reforms in post-communist Eastern Europe. Combining insights from comparative politics and public policy analysis, it examines health reforms in Slovenia, the Czech Republic, and Poland between 1989 and 2019. The book argues that the post-communist transformation of healthcare policy has entailed a process of policy learning, and that the countries' reform pathways were shaped by a series of initiatives aimed at applying market-oriented policy ideas in healthcare. The success of these initiatives has been influenced by three factors: policy legacies, political competition, and institutional configurations. The book offers a novel comparison of health reform in the region and policy changes more generally. It will appeal to scholars and students of public policy, health policy, and European politics.
Tamara Popic is Lecturer at the School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London, UK. Her research interests include health politics and policy in post-communist countries. She is the co-editor of Health Policy in Europe: A Handbook (2021).
