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Should the fox run the hen house?

Comment on: Drawing light from the pandemic: Rethinking strategies for health policy and beyond https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168851021002918

My view is that the pandemic highlighted the failure of public entities and they should not be further rewarded by being put in charge of solutions.

That puts me on the outside of praising this. I share the view that its Euro-centrism makes portability to other parts of the world almost meaningless.

The paper does remind us, though, of the problems, which to be kind we have known about for decades. In many cases they are the result of flawed or careless policy making by civil servants and adoption of suboptimal policy choices by lawmakers.

Many of the proposed solutions will ever more tightly couple healthcare organisations under more administrative surveillance as though more of that was the solution. Indeed, current design models for healthcare systems are themselves conducive to failure so more of the same is not the solution. Governments in Europe and elsewhere are using the pandemic crisis as evidence of market failure requiring government intervention. But failing the pandemic stress test is evidence of government failure. What do they say about a new broom sweeping clean?