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This unit studies how the Australian healthcare system (and that of other countries) is governed. In so doing, it draws on the notion of governmentality, i.e., how we govern and are governed, and the conditions under which different modes of governance emerge, continue to operate, and are transformed in the healthcare sector.
The unit will examine how health care systems are embedded in multiple institutional and regulatory frameworks. We will study a mixture of policy instruments and governance arrangements interweaving the practices of medical professionals (the deliverers of services) and funders (insurers and/or authorities) with the practices of political decision-making and policy formulation. We will also examine how these are financed through a mixture of public and private revenues that in various ways, pool and redistribute the risks related to these goods and services.
The unit will also look at the way modern health care systems are characterised by hybrid governance arrangements. The tax-funded Medicare in Australia will be studied as an example of coordination via command and control, often in combination with dense supply-side regulation, but actually achieved through professional self- regulation by the professional associations of physicians.
We will also examine how, by creating avenues for competition, market mechanisms have become central to the governance of Medicare.