This article focuses on the public aspects of health systems, on the ways in which concerns for health and health care are expressed in politics and policy. It first reviews the origins and development of health policy in the modern state, pointing to the different ways that development has been understood by welfare state scholars. It then discusses the different standard forms of health system, describing the ways health care is paid for, provided, and regulated in advanced industrial countries, and comments on the emergence of a new domain of international and global health. It takes the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States as archetypes of respective systems in regulation patterns. International health issues are interesting not least because they cut across the logic of comparison.