This special section of Health Economics, Policy and Law continues the collaborative effort of exploring issues in health policy common to the United Kingdom and the United States that was initiated several years ago, principally between colleagues at the London School of Economics and Columbia University, but later extended to include others. Previous outputs of this effort have been quite substantial [see volume 36(1) of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, and volume 7(4) of this Journal]; the output reported here is somewhat more modest, but I hope will be of interest to many readers.

In this series of articles, Gwyn Bevan and Larry Brown discuss rationing in the English and American health care systems, Michael Gusmano and Sara Allin examine how the issue of population ageing and health care spending is framed in the UK, US and Canadian print media, and Miriam Laugesen and George France explore the English and US systems through the lens of economic theories of integration. Finally, Peter Ubel and I look at the use of nudge policy to address obesity in the US and the UK.

I wish to thank Rudolf Klein for refereeing all of the papers presented in this section. One area of research that I have been engaged in is the issue of whether people can be motivated to change their behaviours with modest financial incentives. In relation to sustained behaviour change, the evidence is not auspicious. Fortunately, to motivate Rudolf even modest financial incentives are unnecessary.