Scoping review of the literature on the historical and economic evolution of the health systems of Chile, Uruguay, and Costa Rica

Abstract

As part of the project Historical, Institutional, and Economic Development of Public Health Systems in Middle-Income Countries: New Horizons, Latin America in the 20th and 21st Centuries, we conducted a scoping review on the historical, economic, and institutional evolution of national health systems of Chile, Costa Rica and Uruguay. The selection criteria of the cases were two. Firstly, the existence of evidence of different institutional orientations in each country. We selected a strongly market-oriented system (Chile), a universal public healthcare system (Costa Rica) and a system that transitions from the first to the second model (Uruguay).