Decentralization in Health Sector

Like other public sector services, health services have serious problems including technical inefficiency. Among other problems this sector has, one can mention undesired use of allocated resources.Inefficiency is also considered as another problem. Many governments have tried to more or less decentralize health sector in order to solve these problems. These reforms in organization of health services paved the way for substantial changes in approaches to the proper role to be played by governments in health issue. But decentralization and privatization in health sector has been beginner of debates between supporters and opponents of this issue. Today there are valuable experiences in this regard from which we can use. In Iran, decentralization in health sector has been noticed in the third and fourth development plans whose experiences can be reconsidered. It is obvious that there are multiple combinations of private and public between two extreme cases of private and public organizations, which can be a proper formula for supplying health and care services in Iran. Apart from this fact that how policies of Article 44 cover the health sector, this paper tries to review privatization of health services in the world, studying the existing opportunities and threats in this sector through emphasizing on Iranian context.