Political debates about the affordability of health care programmes in high-income countries often point to population ageing as a threat to sustainability. Debates in the United States, in particular, highlight concerns about intergenerational equity, whereby spending on older people is perceived as a threat to spending on the young. This paper compares how the problem of health spending is defined in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States by presenting the results of a content analysis of print media during the period 2005–2010. We found that population ageing was cited as an important source of health care cost increases in all three countries but was cited less frequently in Canadian newspapers than in the UK or US papers. Direct claims about intergenerational equity are infrequent among the articles we coded, but newspaper articles in the United States were more likely than those in Canada and the United Kingdom to claim that of high health care spending on older people takes resources away from younger people. In Canada a much larger percentage of articles in our sample either claimed that high health care spending is crowding out other types of government expenditure. Finally, we found that almost no articles in the United States challenged the view that population ageing causes health care spending, whereas in both Canada and the United Kingdom a small, but steady stream of articles challenged the idea that population ageing is to blame for health care spending increases.

Over recent years, nudge policies have become increasingly popular (if somewhat confused) internationally. This article attempts to clarify what a nudge entails, and critically summarises some of the nudge policies that have been proposed to motivate weight loss in the United Kingdom and the United States. Despite the fact that most of the evidence on nudge-related policy has so far been produced in the United States, and that the leading nudge champions are American, the United Kingdom, at least with respect to considering policy interventions of this kind at the national level, appears to be relatively advanced. That said, nudge interventions remain of marginal practical import everywhere, and are never going to solve completely the obesity problem. Nonetheless, even a marginal effect may extend and improve many lives, a result that would satisfy most behavioural economists.