Envisioning the future of health systems: Exploratory insights from European countries

European countries strive to provide people with a timely and appropriate access to care. Different models and approaches are implemented for this purpose. Whilst scholars have proposed various taxonomies to point out the peculiarities of health system types, little is known about patients’ satisfaction with the health services provided by such systems. This prevents a vision of the future of health care. The article intends to fill this gap through an empirical analysis of secondary data collected from the Eurofound's database. Adhering to the taxonomy developed by Reibling and colleagues (2019), we investigated the performances of health systems types in terms of: 1) perceived quality of health services; 2) affordability of health care; 3) satisfaction with primary care; 4) satisfaction with secondary care; and 5) equity in the provision of care. Findings suggested that countries characterized by a thin access regulation and imposing a cost-sharing mechanism outperformed other health system types. Countries adopting a national health service scheme implying a strict access regulation and limited cost sharing were considered to be unfair. Health systems’ economic and social sustainability relies on the policy makers’ ability to stress the strengths of existing health system types, overcoming their weaknesses in terms of equitable and timely access to care. The future of health care will benefit from a contamination of existing health system types, which may lead to hybrid models able to merge fairness with financial sustainability.