Services Privatized in Local Health Departments
A National Survey of Practices and Perspectives
Bibliographic Data
Privatization of public health is seemingly an oxymoron. Functions such as environmental regulation and communicable disease control would seem to be the unique purview of governmental public health departments. These services constitute public goods in that they affect entire communities, whereas personal health services are private goods, privately consumed by individuals.1 Recent pressures such as the penetration of managed care has led to shifts in personal health service provision from the public to the private sector and to various forms of public–private collaboration.2,3 However, some privatization theorists contend that public goods cannot be as effectively provided by the private sector. Others contend that even certain private goods, such as personal health services, should not be contracted out to the private sector.1 These opinions suggest that research on privatization in local health departments should examine the specific services, both public and private, that have been contracted out, a task previous studies of such health departments have not systematically addressed (L. Whitehand, M. Bechamps, and R. Bialek, unpublished data, 1997).4–15 Other articles based on the national survey of local health department directors described here have not outlined in detail the specific services privatized.16 In the present study, we examined the specific services privatized, the profit vs nonprofit status of contractors, and directors’ views about what services should not be privatized
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| Citations per year | 0.22 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2003 - 2014 (12) |
| Highly cited | No |