Health Politics
Editor: PD Dr. Günter Feuerstein
ISSN 1614-6441
The history of German health politics is a history of decades of failed attempts at reform. This is equally true for the countless concepts for cost dampening as well as the interference into financial and organisational structures of the source of funds. All political endeavors to exert external influence on the structures of the range of medical service and care seem even more ineffecitve. Interventions regulalry miss the complexity of the system, fail because of the multilayered internal control mechanisms and the influence of eonvironmental power relations, specifically in economics, science, and morality.
It is certainly of interest to observe and analyze the institutionalised health politics and its effects against this background. But to do the healthcare system justice as a network of connections between multiple layers in a system of multiple players one has to go beyond studies with a traditional understanding of politics. Acts in Health politics take place on almost every level of the medical care system. Furthermorer, it takes place outside and against the intentions and interventions of the political system. Important structural formations are usually the result of multilayered, complex negotiations caused by tensions in the system or initiated and preformed by scientific technical innovations. This means that there is no one center of power that can exert influence over the constructions and development of supply structures, even within the healthcare system. Control effects that are the result of system internal dynamics, interactions between system and environment, power structures and conflicts of interest are most accurately presented through "governance" in modern political analysis. Sociologists even take a step further in their understanding of politics: They focus their attentions of the phenomenon of "micropolitics" - politics that is controlled and implemented by the actual actors of the organizatione of a system. Health Politics therefore aims to also open up a platform for those works that focus on influencing factors, dynamics and agendas beyond the traditional political understanding.
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