Degree Name
Master of Arts
Graduate Program
Political Science
Advisor
Bloom, Stephen
Abstract
This paper examines how healthcare systems have been created in four countries, the USSR (and then Russia post 1991), Poland, Germany and the United States, how they changed throughout the decades, their efficacy, as well as focusing on aspects such as funding, budget allocation, care quality, and the overall structure of the system. These cases were chosen to give a contrast between the development and subsequent abandonment of the Soviet Semashko system which proposed an entirely state ran and centralized program that was imposed on other Soviet Bloc Countries and the United States’ decentralized employer led health insurance system. Germany was chosen both due to it having one of the oldest health insurance programs, but also because it was split during the cold war and the system that was imposed on East Germany was not the same as the system used by the USSR. Findings reveal that the Soviet Semashko system often had major core contradicting flaws between their ideological rhetoric surrounding healthcare and the actual allocation of resources it received, while Germany’s Bismarkian model achieved a high rate of successful outcomes while being able to minimize costs.