Wealth, Health Care and the Welfare State: The Impact of Institutional Arrangements on Health.

While many sociologists would agree that institutional arrangements impact individual lives, research on health outcomes and health disparities has not empirically tested how broader societal forces impact individual health outcomes. Rather the focus has been on either how the social location of individuals impacts their health or how broader societal factors impact aggregtate health outcomes. Using data from the European Social Survey and multilevel modeling, we test the impact of three broad societal factors and individual-level characteristics on physical and mental health of individuals residing in 22 European nations. The societal factors we focus on are wealth and the distribution of wealth, the social organization of the health care system, and the social organization of the welfare state. Our results show that while individual characteristics impact health in the expected ways (e.g. those with less education have worse health), national-level factors have an impact on the physical and mental well-being of the citizenery. More specifically, those residing in wealthier nations report better health, those living in countries with centralized health care systems and countries that spend less on health report worse health, and while the welfare state appears to have minimal impact on physical health, it promotes mental well-being. This research establishes the importance of looking beyond individual characteristics and consider how these characteristics are embedded within a larger institutional context that impacts health and health disparities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]