The comparison of healthcare benefit extension and standardisation in France and Italy has provided us with testable hypotheses, and in this chapter we begin exploring how well they travel. Our assessment of generalisability employs the same framework taken with regard to benefits for the unemployed, combining a discussion of policy trajectories with public opinion as initial steps towards carrying out broader statistical analysis in the next chapter. That said, country-specific analyses of public opinion can necessarily only play a limited role in this instance, given that our key explanatory variables are national-level factors.

The chapter begins by briefly discussing developments in healthcare coverage and equity in the same six additional Continental and Southern European cases: Austria, Belgium, Germany, Greece, Spain, and Portugal. In this case, the former set of cases represent the social health insurance systems, whilst the latter have (quasi-) universalist healthcare regimes. As in Chapter 3, our goal is twofold: first, to illustrate the extent to which the French and Italian cases are typical, deviant, or simply different within their respective welfare state families; and second, to assess whether determinants similar to those highlighted in the French-Italian comparison appear to play a role in these other countries as well. To preview our conclusions, France and Italy do appear to provide relatively standard illustrations of the reform trajectories within their groups. The Continental cases share the piecemeal extension of benefit access that one would expect, despite considerable variation in the timing and means by which those falling outside of the insurance system were given protection. The Southern European cases also share the expected pattern of coverage extension, though benefit standardisation varies considerably. Indeed, the key factors discussed in the French-Italian comparison appear to have largely been responsible for these differences.

We then proceed to present descriptive statistics of country-level survey data, first from France and Italy, and then from our other Continental and Southern European cases. In particular, this discussion centres around two components of public opinion: attitudes towards government responsibility to provide access to healthcare; and beliefs about the need for dramatic reform of the system. We limit ourselves here to a discussion of survey responses since country-level regression analysis would not allow us to include any of our key variables.