Reconsidering the Role of Competition in Health Care Markets: Introduction Thomas Rice University of California, Los Angeles Brian Biles George Washington University E. Richard Brown University of California, Los Angeles Finn Diderichsen Karolinska Institutet Hagen Kuehn Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung In recent years there has been a surge of interest in reforming the organization and delivery of health systems by relying more on mar- ket competition. Although much of the impetus has emanated from the United States, the phenomenon is worldwide (Brown 1998). Recog- nizing the significance of these trends, in May 1998 we organized an international conference in Berlin on “Reconsidering the Role of Com- petition in Health Care Markets.” The two-day meeting was jointly sponsored by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, the Karo- linska Institutet in Sweden, and the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB; in English, the Berlin Science Center for Social Research). The conference, which was hosted by the WZB, included thirty-one individuals from ten countries. This special section presents a summary of the main issues on which the meeting focused, followed by ten brief reports on the interplay of markets and government in specific developed countries. It concludes with a short analysis of the implications of the forgoing material on health care policy interna- tionally and two commentaries that bring additional perspective to these issues. Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, Vol. 25, No. 5, October 2000. Copyright © 2000 by Duke University Press. Funding for this special section and the conference upon which it is based was generously pro- vided by the Commonwealth Fund and the Volvo Corporation of North America. The views represented herein reflect only those of the authors, and not necessarily their organizations or the funding agencies.