Healthy or Sick?

Philipp Trein is a postdoctoral researcher in political science at the Institute of Political, Historical, and International Studies (IEPHI) of the Université de Lausanne, Switzerland, and a visiting scholar at the Institute of European studies (IES) at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests cover comparative public policy (coordination and integration of policies, health policy, and employment policy), comparative federalism and multilevel governance (including European studies), as well as economic voting (Germany). His research has been published or is forthcoming in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, European Journal of Political Research, German Politics, the Journal of Public Policy, the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice, Public Administration, Publius: The Journal of Federalism, and Regional and Federal Studies.

• 1. Introduction; 2. Sectoral coupling of health care and public health; 3. Theoretical priors; 4. Global context and case selection; 5. UK: institutional unification and tight coupling of health care and public health; 6. Australia: politicized professions and tight coupling of health care and public health; 7. Germany: dominance of individual health care and de-coupling from public health; 8. Switzerland: Institutional fragmentation, depoliticized professions, and non-coupling; 9. US: politicized professions and loose coupling of health care and public health; 10. Coevolution of policy sectors. Health care and public health in a comparative perspective.

'Trein's book is a remarkable achievement, stimulating, deeply informed and addressing some of the most vexing issues in the application of institutional/historical frameworks to complex policy developments. From an interest in how policy sectors coordinate well or poorly, Trein treats five country cases as evidence for his view that overall governance arrangements shape whether, in the policy fields of public health and medical care are integrated and cooperative or not. The theory, the applications, and findings make a genuine contribution of the comparative and historical study of health policies, a field much in need of theoretical clarity and accurate cross-national evidence.' Theodore Marmor, Yale University, Connecticut and co-author of Politics, Health, and Health Care