A 100-member citizens’ assembly tasked with addressing rising healthcare costs met for the first time this weekend at the University of Zurich. She will present her results next spring.
The project is the result of a collaboration between the universities of Zurich and Geneva, coordinated by the Aarau Center for Democracy Studies (ZDA). The aim is to examine if and how citizen assemblies enrich democratic debates.
It is precisely in the area of health policy, where political decision-making often stagnates, that such assemblies could provide new impetus, underlines the Citizens’ Assembly in its press release.
Planned report
After getting to know each other and becoming familiar with the theme of increasing health costs, participants will define a priority area for future discussions.
The aim is to narrow down the topic and determine what is particularly relevant to the assembly, for example basic insurance, hospitals, volume expansion, care coordination or health promotion and prevention.
The assembly will present its results next spring. A final report will serve as the basis for an objective public debate and “will provide the political world with a differentiated image of opinion”. The assembly will present arguments linked to different reform proposals and take positions on them.
Providing clues to the political world
“The final result is really completely open. We do not know what the content of the final report will be,” said political scientist Nenad Stojanovic, co-organizer of the project, on Monday in La Matinale de la RTS.
“There is of course the hope that all this work can be used both by the political world and by the federal administration, in particular the Federal Office of Health, to enrich their thinking and their debates on the responses possibilities that we can give to the question ‘how to curb health costs'”, he argued.
>> Listen to Nenad Stojanovic in La Matinale:
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