The Role of Private Providers in the Italian Public Health Care System

The paper addresses three different questions in relation to public-private partnership in health care. What the main public-private partnerships models in health care in Italy are and how they have evolved over time. How differences in the adoption of public-private partnership models can be explained. The possible impact of different public-private partnership models on the overall institutional performance of NHS. On one side the article shows how important is to adopt also a path dependency approach to account for most recent transformations in the public-private interaction. On the other the paper argues that there is not a significant relationship between diffusion of private provision and NHS performance: the outcome of public-private partnerships depend quite strongly on public governance capacity.