Page 160 - Human Rights

Faculty of Nursing
Adult care Nursing Department

Healthcare is valued not only by the community but also as a major social right.

Then, perhaps a specific definition of healthcare regulation should include its major goals.

This framework assumes that a specific set of values should also be considered while defining
healthcare regulation, namely the foundational values of the healthcare system.

Balancing equity and efficiency, which are the main dilemma of public healthcare systems, may

be a specific goal of regulation.

This conceptual perspective is also useful to determine whether the new regulatory models

perform better with respect to the control of market and government failure, namely, in the
establishment of priorities in healthcare (Stern 2012).

Then, healthcare regulations can be reframed much more specifically than it has been in the past,

when it was regarded as tantamount to legislation, to include both independent regulatory

agencies (IRAs) and direct government regulators.

In the past decades, a new perspective of regulation has been adopted by most modern societies.

The core philosophical approach of this new perspective is the need to control different providers

(public, private for-profit, and private not-for-profit) that compete for the same contract (Sussex
2001). This competition can lead to unacceptable consequences in terms of rationing healthcare

like unjust discrimination of patients in need of access to healthcare services. It is understandable

why IRAs are increasingly important for effective health care regulation (Nunes et al. 2007).

Girardi (2004) defines non-majoritarian institutions’ IRAs as “public organizations with regulatory
powers that are neither directly elected by people nor directly managed by elected officials.”

Its independent nature (political, economic, and financial) gives IRAs considerable administrative

capacity in the healthcare sector with legal powers of supervision and control (Box 10.1)

138 Academic Year 2025/2026