Saeed Alraga
Objective: To compare the design and functioning of three health care systems in two developed countries, Australian and Switzerland with a developing country, Saudi Arabia.
Methods: Each country’s health care system was described and examined in terms of its funding, consumer participation, and overall governance on a local to national level.
Results: All three countries demonstrate a different funding model of health care system ranging from public and private contributions to the payment of health care insurance to a rely solely on government funding for health care services. While the third option obliges consumers with the sole responsibility for health care services.
Conclusion: Each health care system is vastly different in its governance, overall design, function and has a range of strengths and weaknesses in each system. There is much to be learnt from each system and improvements are to be made to each health system on an individualized basis. The limitations of this paper include a lack of influencing factors such as the cultural values and economic stability for each country.
