With the demographic changes and especially the rise of chronic illness, primary care is emerging as a visionary model of reform at European levels. Importantly, this model of reform travels easily across different countries, as primary care also enjoys high currency in relation to the modernisation agendas in both established and transition welfare states. Not surprisingly, primary care reforms have common features in otherwise highly different institutional settings. However, primary care reform strongly challenges existing organisational arrangements in healthcare and combined with the limited jurisdiction at international levels such as the EU, reforms are to a considerable extent influenced by national health care states. Against this background, the aim of the paper is to analyse how primary care as a European model for health policy is translated into national health reforms and to identify which (country-)specific factors are at play. Here, the paper focuses on the importance of variations in welfare institutional contexts and their implications for the policies and politics of reform. As primary care reforms are blurring the boundaries between governance tools related to professional self regulation, and those related to new managerial regimes, the medical profession and public regulatory bodies are important actors in the process of translating European health policy models. More specifically, the paper compares primary care policies in England, Germany and Russia. The first two countries represent well-established welfare states, while the third has a welfare state in transition. The analysis consists of country case studies of specific reforms.
