Social science scholarship on the distributional effects of welfare states typically focuses on economic outcomes such as poverty and income inequality.  Such scholarship has established new ways of thinking about how the institutional "rules of the game" distribute life chances, but its narrow focus on income restricts theoretical development in a range of unanticipated ways.  This panel shows how attention to welfare states as institutional arrangements that distribute population health across stratified societies can generate original theoretical development.  Specifically, panelists draw attention to health as a multidimensional process of social causation that reveals synchronous, asynchronous, and cumulative effects in ways that income and poverty do not.  The analysis of health as a distributional outcome of institutional arraangments has the potential to shed new light on puzzles such as (1) the growing US mortality disadvantage relative to European populations, (2) the relationship between aggregate-average population health measures like life expenctancy, and social inequalties in health, and (3) the surprisingly-high levels of social inequality in health that persist in income-egalitarian welfare states.