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The United States' health care system stands out for its strict division of policies dealing with public health and individual medicine. Seeking to explain how this division came to be, what alternative paths might have been taken, and how this shapes the contemporary landscape, Daniel Sledge offers nothing less than a reinterpretation of the making of modern American health policy in Health Divided.Where previous scholars have focused on failed attempts to adopt national health insurance, Sledge demonstrates that the development of health policy cannot be properly understood without considering the connections between public health policy and policies dealing with individual medicine. His work shows how the distinct politics of the formative years of health policy - and the presence of debilitating diseases in the American South - led to outcomes that have fundamentally shaped modern policies and disputes.