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This article’s aim is to reintroduce the teleological approach formulated by professor Karel Engliš hundred years ago indicating it as a valuable analytical tool for social systems, including the health one. Engliš enriched the positive and normative approach of scientific analysis with teleological one, using postulates based on the principle of finality, and distinguished it both from positive causality and narrow normative measures or legal norms. Because health economics has been often struggling with managing the plurality of health systems, it is worth searching in theory for approaches that may improve this deficit and Engliš’s approach has shown as perfectly suitable for this purpose. We therefore subsequently explain its logic, which was thoroughly defended by Engliš in the literature in 1920s and 1930s. Then we look for specific attributes of four different health systems (the USA, the Netherlands, Germany, Great Britain) from teleological point of view and sum them up into a table which briefly combines social models, fiscal and tax policy measures, and ideals/postulates that those systems are based on. The result is better understanding of the health systems configuration and solid theoretical knowledge behind it, easing the need for finding the optimal or “most effective” health system by recognizing that more important is to know which properties and characteristics it ought to have and which principles it is built on.