Toward a new conceptualization of health care services. Public national health service as a common pool of resources

The current economic and financial crisis weakens western economies, laying bare their frailties and exerting a strong pressure on the sustainability of their welfare system. In particular, the publicly funded national health service, a basic part of the “welfare state model” in some European countries, goes through a hard period, tightened in the stranglehold between scarce resources and increasing needs. Borrowing from economics, care services are conceived as “nonexcludable”, but “rival” goods; from this point of view, the publicly funded national health system is conceptualized as a “common pool resource”. The matter is analyzed from a theoretical standpoint, adopting a qualitative approach: the author proposes general reasoning and basic remarks, deferring to further researches any empirical application. This article contributes to the scientific research by offering a new perspective from which to explore the trends of publiclyfunded national health systems. The “Common Pool Resources” theory and the “Institutional Analysis and Development” framework are the key tools employed for the analysis: they allow to examine in-depth the sustainability issues of these systems, paving the way to the introduction of innovative strategic and managerial approach applied to health care organizations.