The incentives to provide good health care are not so different from the incentives to provide basic education. Keeping the labor force humming is the primary concern for leaders of small-coalition countries—everything, and everyone, else is inessential. There is no point in spending lots of money on the health of people who are not in the labor force and who won’t be in the labor force for a long time. One of the more depressing ways in which this can be seen is in the relation between the performance of health care systems for infants and the size of a government’s winning coalition.
