Beyond Medicine: Why European Social Democracies Enjoy Better Health Outcomes Than the United States

Comparative health systems and policy is a wondrous intellectual and decision-making enterprise. From (to mention only a few) Kervasdoue, Kimberly, and Rodwin's The End of an Illusion (1984) by way of Anderson's The Health Services Continuum in Democratic States (1989) and Glaser's Europe's Decentralized and Semi-Private Health Insurance (1989) onto Ellencweig's Analyzing Health Systems—A Modular Approach (1992), Joe White's Competing Solutions (1995), and Saltman et al.’s Critical Challenges for Health Care Reform in Europe—ending up (so far) with Professor Dutton's book, scholars seek to solve a more-than-three-dimensional Rubik's cube of historical social processes, cultural and ideological orientations, economic exigencies and contingencies, constitutional and governance arrangements, media and rhetoric, population health status and health care outcomes, and more. The field is a spiral of reinventing and revisiting wheels, enacted in thousands of journals, books, and international meetings, all comprising an...