Examining the role of expertise as an ‘access good’ in the CEE healthcare policy

Healthcare policy is extremely complex and multidimensional. It includes not only legal regulations, social, financial, political, scientific and ethical aspects, but also involves many actors and institutions at different levels. It is one of the most socially and politically sensitive public policies. Like many other public policies, it covers both practical activity and scientific discipline. Nevertheless, its practical, applicative dimension is considered more important than the theoretical one. For healthcare policy, as for other knowledge and evidence-based sectors, medical expertise seem to be of crucial importance together with economic and legal circumstances. In order to make appropiate decisions, governing actors need various types of expertise as well as experience of healthcare professionals. From production, through communication and aquisition to use in healthcare policy, expertise plays different roles at each of stages listed (Peterson, 2018). In this article we focus only on functional aspects of expertise as goods provided by interest groups to policy-makers in order to achieve their policy goals. Against this background, we aim to examine the role of expertise in accessing various types of decision-makers: executive and legislature. Interest groups, which are at the core of thys analysis, vary substantially in terms of their type, the issue they represent, as well as their resources. Those resources can be perceived as an ‘access goods’, which interest groups employ in order to gain access to policy-makers (Bouwen, 2002). Different types of resources, of which expertise is recognized as one of the most important, are demanded by different policy-makers. The role of expertise in accessing policy-makers in healthcare have not yet attracted much attention in academic research. This applies even more to healthcare policy in regard to Central Eastern Europe (CEE region). Drawing on extensive survey exercise conducted among different types of healthcare policy actors in four post-communist countries, we aim to fulfill this research gap by exploring the extend to which different types of expertise provided by interest groups are demanded by different policy-makers on domestic level across selected CEE countries.