Introduction
The governments through its ministry, authority, agency or officials have fundamental roles in making authoritative decisions, adoptions, or course of actions to be pursued.
Government should be instrumental in recognizing the existence of health problems, conducting public awareness on the issue, studying the problem and its causes, deciding the parties to be involved in fixing the problem as health care services or operations at that particular time are scrutinized according to (Abood, S., 2007). Health problems may be health care coverage/delivery, funding, administration Medicare ethics, maternal and child health etc. Exploring the alternative plans of actions to solve the health issues as goals and objectives are set. New policy developed through consultation between government officials, individual citizens, and interested groups while figuring out the possibility of obstacles. This may include offering advanced care planning, improving equity and efficiency by addressing market failures, strengthening health system, fostering new discoveries through medical research, regulating and supervising the safety of drugs, vaccines, biomedical products ,patients and medical practitioners. Once the best approach to solving the problem has received enough community support, it may be taken to parliament as a bill for legislative approval.eg one of the approaches may be universal or non universal coverage or second-tier covering both.
The adopted policy must be implemented by the relevant officials, agencies or authorities charged with the responsibility of measuring compliance through regulations, to ensure that working version of the policies are put into action. Federal officials or agency enforce the policy for a specified time before evaluating its impact on the problem in question as agreed by (Boufford, and Lee,. 2001) . It is the state officials or authority to determine how effective the policy may be working. This is executable through cost benefit analysis to ascertain if the benefits derived from the policy are worth the incurred expenditure. It’s the prime duty of government to make changes to remedy the negative impacts of the policy which may have not been envisaged during policy formulation. If the policy becomes obsolete beyond implementation, it’s upon the government to terminate its enforcement by coming up with a sustainable policy addressing the same health problem.eg wrong conception of health care philosophy may give the reverse of its meaning, for example taking health care as a commodity allowing government to privatize healthcare for free enterprise formulating better profit making healthcare system instead of viewing health care as human right compelling federal government to provide health care to all its citizens despite their ability of meeting the costs.
In a democratic liberal society, the government has the privilege to establish its health policies with its performance checked by the voting public who elect their leaders to carter for their interests in the government. The government policy should guide the enacted law in setting the minimum standards affecting the health care provisions and scope with integration of policy makers at local, state or state level.
References
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CONFESSORE NICHOLAS (2011), Policy-Making Billionaires, retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/sunday-review/policy-making-billionaires.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Boufford, Jo Ivey and Lee, R. Phillip (2001), Health Policies for the 21st Century: Challenges and Recommendations for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, retrieved from http://www.milbank.org/uploads/documents/010910healthpolicies.html
Kroszner, S. Randall. Economics and Policymaking: Taking Academia to the Real World, retrieved from http://www.esri.go.jp/jp/workshop/050709/050709Kroszner.pdf
The Council of State Government, (2008) .State Policy Guide: Using Research in Public Health Policymaking, retrieved from http://www.csg.org/knowledgecenter/docs/health/StatePolicyGuideCP.pdf
