preview

Spanish National Health System Case Study

Decent Essays

As a part of the so-called Welfare State, the Spanish National Health System (SNS, in the Spanish acronym) was not reached until the end of the Franco dictatorship, emerging with a significant delay compared to other European countries. At the full swing of the Spanish transition, with the Spanish Workers’ Socialist Party (PSOE) in government, Spain approved the General Health Act 1986 (GHA) inspired in Beveridge’s models: universal access, free at the point of delivery and tax-financed health system. However, the belated SNS came 40 years after the creation of the English National Health System (NHS) -one of the most important between Beveridge’s models- and in a social and political context outlined by 1970s recession and the consequent …show more content…

Developing the Catalan Health System (CHS), the regional government raised the choice between expanding the own network transferred from the state (ICS) or strengthening external entities that offered already services in Catalonia. The Health Map adopted in 1984 clearly opted for the second option including under the public health network the transferred publicly entities with the organisms belonging to municipalities or local commissions together with private non-profit bodies (Pastor, 2008). This structure configured a system where ICS managed 90% of primary care, but only 30% of the specialized care, which was mainly operated by local public entities or private hands (Serna, 2009).
At the wave of the NPM, Western Countries policies and standards reinforced the new configuration of CHS (Gallego, 2000), which on the other hand obtained an important social consensus in the Catalan territory (Sabaté i Casellas, 2015). All health systems in the high-income world, being Bismarckian, Beveridge, or even private models (such as the United States) were (and still are) mutually influenced (Fletcher, 2014), applying NPM methods in health and other social welfare different ways (Hood, 1996). Indeed, the UK NHS is a good example, experiencing at that time the increase of consumerism, the establishment of services’ standardization and competitive tendering for ancillary services, inspired by the speeches

Get Access