Public Health Policies and Social Inequality By Charles F. Andrain. New York: New York University Press, 1998. 292p. $50.00. The Politics of Health in Europe. By Richard Freeman. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000. 164p. $69.95. Governing the Health Care State: A Comparative Study of the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany By Michael Moran. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. 196p. $69.95 cloth, $24.95 paper. Accidental Logics: The Dynamics of Change in the Health Care Arena in the United States, Britain, and Canada By Carolyn Hughes Tuohy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 312p. $45.00.

Extract

International meetings about health-care issues—conferences, symposia, cyber-gatherings—have become something of an epidemic in the past decade. There is a brisk trade in the latest panaceas offered for the various real and imagined ills of modern medical care systems. When policy fixes fail in their country of origin, they are regularly offered to unsuspecting audiences elsewhere. Moreover, what travels as comparative analysis is often simply a collection of parallel descriptions of national health arrangements. So when there is a flurry of systematic comparative studies of health care by political scientists, a development illustrated by the four books under review, one ought to pay attention.