ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to review in detail the various policies, bearing on both the supply of and demand for health care, adopted in different countries. Welfare States come in many different shapes, and much academic energy has been devoted to arranging them into neat typologies. The ‘Welfare State’ is another protean notion. The change in the structure of families, and the relative roles of men and women, clearly demands radical adaptation by Welfare States in the structure of benefits systems. Health care is neither the largest nor fastest growing component of public spending on welfare. The income maintenance programs that constitute the heartland of Welfare States involve shuffling money according to rules of entitlement laid down by central governments. The concept of the Welfare State, similarly, is a hold-all notion which, when unpackaged, turns out to cover a wide spectrum of social and institutional arrangements: differences between nations are the norm.
