Dr. Martin Bojar: Healthcare after the Velvet Revolution

The Czech Republic has undergone seismic changes since Soviet Union control came to an end in 1989, taking with it a fully socialized and state-managed health care system. Exposure to market forces and health care practitioner incentives as well as desire for new medical technologies and drugs came up against if not collided with public health needs and a health care system rooted in universal health care where individuals did not pay for services. Understanding the dynamics that drove the adaptation of the Czech health system, and its efforts to balance "mission and market," especially as the European Union came to be, offers significant insights into how one of the promising stories of the post Soviet era worked to resolve these tensions. Its experience also offers lessons for the US as it grapples with major health care reform.

Dr. Martin Bojar has experienced this transition first hand and was part of its evolution. Appointed as the first Minister of Health after the first free elections in the post communist era by Vaclav Havel, Dr. Bojar, one of the country's leading neurologists specializing in such conditions as Lyme Disease, was instrumental in leading the Czech Republic's health care system through this difficult time of transition—a role that was documented in his co-authorship of a related report in the Journal of the American Medical Association, "Health care in the Czech Republic: a system in transition." His appointments to national health care advisory groups within and outside government have kept him fully engaged in his nation’s "work in progress."