Worrying about Accounting in Health Care

Abstract

Aims to promote concern and debate about the penetration of accounting and financial management in the health care sectors of several Anglo‐Saxon countries – the United States, United Kingdom and New Zealand. Questions may be raised in several ways. For example, by highlighting how accounting concepts such as “costs” are not neutral notions but rather are sites for struggles of divergent interests or by commenting on how accounting may change or be changed by different organizational and societal rationalities. Concern may also be raised by questioning the effects of accounting change in terms wider than the purely instrumental and thereby arguing that its global spread is grounded more in faith than “factual” evidence regarding its efficacy.