In view of the continuing preoccupation of all industrialized countries with the rising share of national resources devoted to health care, it is valuable to compare the fmanc ing and breakdown of health care expenditure on an international basis. How far should public spending on health care be regarded as a capital investment in the improvement of the health of the population and how far as subsidies to individual consumption? This question is of major importance to policy makers, including the me dical profession, politicians, employers, social security officials as well as to the public...

All too frequently, the largest effective barrier to interdisciplinary communication is jargon. The symposium whose proceedings appear in the following pages sought, of course, to eliminate unnecessary and obscurantist jargon; but it sought also to do something far more ambitious - to confront the intellectual issues that are attached to the use of the word "evaluation" in medicine and health services. To this end a carefully selected group of experts in medicine, epidemiology, and health econom ics was invited to present papers. They were selected for their reputations either as...

Das groBte Hindernis, das dem interdisziplinaren Gedankenaustausch im Wege steht, ist haufig der Jargon. Wahrend des Symposiums, des sen Beitrage und Diskus sionen auf den folgenden Seiten verOffentlicht werden, versuchten wir natiirlich, jede unnotig verschleiernde Fachsprache auszuschalten; gleichzeitig waren wir be strebt, ein vie! ehrgeizigeres Ziel zu erreichen: die Konfrontation mit den intellektu ellen Sachverhalten, die mit der Verwendung des Wortes "Evaluation" in der Medi zin und den Gesundheitsdiensten verbunden sind. Zu diesem Zweck wurde eine sorgfaltig ausgewahlte Gruppe von...