National health systems as market interventions.

National health systems have developed in all countries; their features have been shaped largely by organized interventions in the free market of health service. Any health system can be characterized through analysis of five major components: (1) its production of resources, (2) organization of programs (including a residual private market), (3) sources of economic support, (4) modes of management, and (5) patterns of providing services. The diverse types of health systems in the world may be categorized in a matrix derived from two dimensions: (a) the economic level (four steps), and (b) the political ideology of the health system, scaled (also four steps) from highly entrepreneurial (minor market intervention) to socialist (nearly complete market intervention). Every national health system would fit into one of the 16 cells of this matrix, although positions change as a result of economic and political dynamics.