AN EXPERT IS DEFINED as someone from out of
town ? with slides. In health care, such experts
also have a tendency to make cross-national
comparisons on the basis of a short visit, a few
conversations, and a desire to indicate ?lessons
learned?.1 In that time-honoured tradition, on the
basis of a visit to Melbourne to address the
Victorian Healthcare Association, coupled with
visits to several local hospitals, this Canadian
identified several potential problems arising from
Australia?s approach to the public?private mix of
hospital services.
As Keynes noted, ?The ideas of economists and
political philosophers, both when they are right and
when they are wrong, are more powerful than is
commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled
by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves
to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence,
are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.?2
Over the past decades, many health care reformers
have urged change ? with varying degrees of
success ? based on a set of ideas that markets are
always right, that competition is both necessary and
sufficient for efficiency, and that private is superior to
public. One consequence has been a push for a
greater role for private delivery of health care services.
This is currently hotly contested in Canada,
with Australia providing either an exemplary example
or a cautionary tale, depending upon ideological
proclivities.
I was therefore interested in learning more from
Australians as to areas of success or failure of the
public?private mix in Australia, and this paper
highlights my observations.
Researching the public/private mix in health care in a Thai urban area: methodological approaches
