Health Politics in Europe: A Handbook is a major contribution to an enduring quest to compare Europe's disparate health systems in order to not only understand them but also to improve them (Marmor, Freeman, and Okma 2005; Sturdy, Freeman, and Smith-Merry 2013). In this task, the handbook offers readers an authoritative account of the historical and current political-institutional trajectories of 36 health systems in Europe.
Such an expansive task comes with a health warning: this book is a tome. At more than 1,000 pages, it can neither be thrown into a bag to read on a train journey nor comfortably held to read in an armchair. It is a book that requires a desk. In the preface, the editors, all leading lights of contemporary European health policy analysis, reflect on the experience of compiling the handbook during the “horrifying stress test” (v) of our health systems that has...
