DOCTORS AND DEFICITS: REGULATING THE MEDICAL PROFESSION IN FRANCE

This paper seeks to analyze the political factors involved in health care delivery in a modern industrial welfare state and to illustrate how the transformation of the French state has affected the policymaking environment surrounding this particular issue. Cultural traditions rooted in the nineteenth century seriously circumscribed the role of the state in de-the conditions of medical practice. Nonetheless, pressures emerging since 1945 for the provision of a wide array of social services have drawn the state into ever closer regulation of the health sector. The economic constraints of the past decade resulted in state-imposed cost-containment policies which accentuated the trend toward politicization of health care. In consequence, and despite the rear-guard defensive tactics of the medical profession, the French state has succeeded in firmly establishing its primacy in this major area of public policy.