The onset of the economic crisis more than a decade ago posed extreme challenges to health care systems that may now be repeated with the COVID-19 pandemic. The resulting policies produced a wide range of (in some cases, even opposite) outcomes: increased or decreased public expenditures for health care. Curiously, however, countries that were considered particularly hard hit by the economic crisis showed different extremes of policy outcomes. Investigating these developments requires a dynamic view and identifying explanations for government action in one direction or the other. Using the lenses of several theoretical perspectives in public policy research, this article analyses the conditions under which public health expenditures changed in European Union member states after the financial crisis. Why did certain countries, at first sight similarly affected, show opposite outcomes? A Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) confirms that left-wing governments and coordinated market economies, in combination and alone, tended to increase public health expenditures in the short term, whereas countries where neither of these conditions was present decreased public health expenditures.

十多年前经济危机的爆发给医疗保健系统带来了极大的挑战，现在可能会随着 COVID-19 大流行而重演。由此产生的政策产生了广泛的（在某些情况下，甚至是相反的）结果：增加或减少医疗保健的公共支出。然而，奇怪的是，被认为受到经济危机打击特别严重的国家表现出不同的极端政策结果。调查这些发展需要动态的观点，并确定政府在一个方向或另一个方向上的行动的解释。本文运用公共政策研究中的几个理论视角，分析了金融危机后欧盟成员国公共卫生支出变化的情况。为什么某些国家，乍一看同样受影响，结果相反？一项定性比较分析 (QCA) 证实，左翼政府和协调的市场经济体联合或单独倾向于在短期内增加公共卫生支出，而这两种情况均不存在的国家则减少了公共卫生支出。