Modernising health care: reinventing professions, the state and the public

Healthcare reform has been a constant phenomenon for the last two decades, regardless of being Bismarckian or Beveridgean. The launch of new reforms has increased in pace to a point that was defined, in a recent BMJ article on the UK National Health Service, as ‘constant redisorganisation’. Most of the policy analysis literature on healthcare reforms has been of Anglo-American origin. Consequently, a study on the German health insurance based system is very welcome, indeed, long overdue.