Public Policy Timing in a Sustainable Approach to Shaping Public Policy

This study addresses the problem of optimal public policy timing and the relation to public health policy. Ways of recognizing this problem are presented, as well as the role of public policy timing, which is perceived or can be performed from various economic theories and concepts, mainly: regulation theory; the concept of adaptive public policy; and the theory of policy timing based on the concepts of option value and the transaction costs of the political process. The approach of methodological pluralism adopted by the authors made it possible to reach for various cognitive inspirations borrowed from numerous theoretical approaches, in order to create a comprehensive and coherent theoretical foundation for the purposes of analyzing the role of timing in applied public policies. Next, an attempt was made to define the role of public policy timing in the applied approach, i.e., the case of Polish policy towards the public hospital care sector. The final conclusion is that the role of timing is marginalized in Polish public health policy. The time dimension of its creation was ignored or treated as an exogenous event in relation to the rest of the policy formulation process. There is no political approach that adaptively links the right combination of resources and regulatory activity to timing for specific stages of development or growth in public hospital care.