Globalization, migration, demographic change, and electoral shifts create pressures on national governments to reform welfare states to meet these challenges. Understanding how the complex reform process takes place and how aspects like public opinion, the domestic political configuration or external pressure play into it is no easy task. The welfare state literature has been trying to address these issues over the past few decades; however, more research is necessary to understand how the general findings from the welfare literature translate into life-cycle risk related policy fields such as health care. How do individual attitudes towards the health care system affect policy reform and how are they affected by it? Does health care saliency play a role? Does health care reform follow the political equality rule or does policy tend to be more responsive towards some groups? How do context related aspects like the type of health care system, the political configuration or the external pressure factor into this? These are but a few questions that the papers in this panel aim to tackle using both qualitative case studies and quantitative analyses based on cross-sectional longitudinal data. Taken together, the papers further our understanding regarding the drivers of health care reform.