Depoliticising Healthcare? Governments' Discourse on Health Reforms in Portugal, Greece, and Ireland during the Great Recession

During the Great Recession, Europe’s most vulnerable countries introduced series of radical health reforms. Most recent studies of health politics argue that partisanship has become less important in struggles over health reforms, and that consequently healthcare is more of a valence then positional issue. Studies more specially focused on health reforms in crisis also argue that governments often rely on blame-shifting, shifting responsibilities for radical reforms to external actors. Taken together, these claims suggest healthcare has become depoliticised and that we should expect this tendency to be amplified in the context of crisis. We test these claims from a discourse perspective, through comparative analysis of government speeches on healthcare reforms in Portugal, Greece, and Ireland, during the Great Recession. More specifically, we ask whether there is a partisan dimension in the governments’ framing of crisis-driven healthcare reforms and whether governments rely on blame-shifting, justifying health reforms as outcomes of external pressures. The article uses original data and applies comparative analysis to examine the content of arguments used by governments in the three countries to explain and justify health reforms. Our preliminary findings show that the use of partisan framing was more frequent in Ireland, which was relatively less affected by the economic crisis compared to Greece and Portugal. They also show that when it comes to partisan framing overall, social framing was more common than market framing of health reforms, and that blame avoidance with reference to international commitments was used less frequently than reference to domestic commitments. Lastly, the findings also show that the use of blame avoidance was never coupled with the partisan framing, in contrast to the use of reference to domestic commitments as justification for health reforms. In sum, this provides only a partial confirmation for our thesis of healthcare depoliticization in the context of crisis.