Ekonomi eller demokrati - Vägledande värden för vårdval i primärvården

Sammanfattning: Since the emergence of new public management in the public sector there has been a questioning of which values has come to characterize the political decision-making. In 2009 the Swedish Parliament approved a policy reform which created conditions for competition in health care. The policy reform aimed to increase patients' ability to freedom of choice, and the quality of the health care. The policy reform has been discussed in terms of being an effect of NPM. The aim of this study is to examine and clarify the appearance of specific values in the chosen policy reform introduced in the Swedish health care in 2010. To fulfill the purpose of the study a model which consist of two ideal types has been created. These two ideal types presents two sets of values which contains democratic and economic values. The model is then applied on the discussion of the policy reform in order to extract which values motivated the introduction of the reform. The study comes to the conclusion that economic values are more present then the democratic ones in the studied policy reform and that a possible explanation is the emergence of new public management in the public sector.