Changes in health financing: the Chilean experience.

This paper examines the organizational and financial changes experienced by the Chilean Health System in the last 20 years. The succession of widely different political and philosophical views sponsored by the governments of Frei, Allende and Pinochet and the marked economic fluctuations experienced in the last decade have affected the organization of health care financing and the allocation of resources among the population. The trend towards a completely state financed health care system was reversed in 1973. Pinochet's government explicitely included the private sector in the provision of public health services and assigned the State a subsidiary role. Several financing mechanisms created to coopt private capital into the health system are described as well as the evolution of private and public health care expenditures. The political and economic context that shapes the allocation of limited health care resources among a population with a highly unequal income distribution may endanger the access and the quality of health care services in the country.