Comparative Implications: Public Policy and Alternative Politics in the Case of the Israeli Healthcare System

This paper explores the relationship between the strategic behavior drawn from a given political culture and adopted by citizens and decision makers, and the characteristics of policy-making processes. Specifically, this paper advances the concept of alternative politics to describe a "do-it-yourself" approach where citizens on their own adopt extra-legal, and often illegal, strategies to improve their political outcomes. The paper explains the conditions under which such an approach evolves and the ways in which it changes the context and environment of policy-making processes. The study analyzes processes in the Israeli healthcare system that can be compared with processes in other countries. It focuses on the expression and potential effect of alternative politics in three processes: the development of black market medicine, the process through which the basket of healthcare services is decided, and the decline in the public share of financing the healthcare system.