The Politics of Health in Europe

This book is explicitly comparative, and comparison is essential to the analyses it develops. The book is explicitly concerned with the liberal democracies of western Europe. The countries covered in detail here - Italy, Sweden and the UK, and France and Germany - constitute a purposive sample. The distinction between national health services and social insurance systems is not real, but an abstract formulation which makes a wealth of information more manageable. Choosing these countries makes sense not because they are somehow representative of general types but because, between them, they are indicative of particular sets of problems in the politics of health and health care. The working assumption here is that the public provision of health care is embedded in a distinctively European politics.