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This text provides a guide to the health-care reforms now underway in many industrialized countries, as technological advances and demographic changes cause the gap between the demand for health services and available funding to widen. The book contains a comprehensive discussion of the health-care systems and reforms in 12 developed countries and includes projections of the growing gap between demand for health care and the level of the available funds. The book also derives a model health-care system which demonstrates how countries can increase the efficiency with which health care is provided while ensuring that every citizen has access to health care. A glossary describes the health-care institutions of the countries surveyed. The book analyzes the health-care systems of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and the United States, and discusses the role of the European Union in health policy. A separate chapter is dedicated to each system, and a consistent format allows simple comparison across countries. Each chapter contains: a detailed description of the existing health-care system which analyzes the role of each participant and the economic incentives that influence their behaviour, and examines how these incentives interact and sometimes conflict to lead to distortions in the health-care system. Finally, this guide provides a discussion of reform policies currently being debated or introduced in each country; and includes recommendations for new health-care reforms which will facilitate consistent movement to the proposed health-care model. The country studies and statistical annexes should make this book a useful reference source for students of international health care.