Why did affording universal access to hospital and medical care become the surpassing motive of national health reform in Canada during the postwar era? Why did American efforts to convert health care financing to the medium of insurance culminate in private health plans for the working population and government-funded programs for old-age pensioners and welfare recipients, while stranding millions of Americans from insurance of either kind?This comparative study offers a pathbreaking account of why hospital reforms became a driving force behind the defeat of national health insurance in the United States and by contrast, provided the opening wedge for universal health insurance in Canada.Terry Boychuk surveys the historical transformation of American and Canadian hospital industries and hospital polices from colonial times to the advent of federal interventions into health care financing and regulation after World War Il. The Making and Meaning of Hospital Policy in the United States and Canada explores how the institutionalization of publicly funded hospital care under the jurisdiction of state, provincial, and local governments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fixed the ideological parameters of national debates over the postwar reconstruction of health policy in both countries.This book will appeal to students of health policy, social policy, and American and Canadian political history.

Terry Boychuk is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, Macalester College.