Health Care Briefing 2003

It thereby provides precisely the opportunity sought by the Commission to improve the competitiveness of the pharmaceutical industry in Europe, and thus to help to improve public health and benefit consumers. [...] The more decisions that deny availability of treatments which might indeed be beneficial, the greater will be the stifling of medical progress and the prevention of long-term improvements in the development of high quality, cost-effective care. [...] Third, the Law on Health Insurance of 1994, which survived the test of a popular referendum in 1996, has introduced managed competition into the health care sector to an extent that seems to at least parallel the other two well-known examples, Belgium and the Netherlands. [...] They are calculated on fixed rates for the number of people within the service area, the number of licensed hospital beds, the number of licensed specialist units and the volume of production units (i.e. [...] Johan Hjerqvist, the Director of the Timbro Health Unit in Stockholm, and one of the brains behind the Stockhom health reforms which have been influential across the globe, analysed their impact at a lunchtime seminar.