Welfare states are highly innovative when it comes to dealing with care. The range of policies in place across nations is striking as is the degree to which making provision for care cuts across long-standing principles of social provision. This article focuses on care as a policy good, identifying care as an inherently social activity and linking it with different manifestations in and anticipated outcomes of public policy. Care is developed here as one of the key activities connecting state and society. Making provision for care, it is argued, affects a whole series of societal settlements. A consideration of a number of such settlements helps to identify factors which must be taken into account when we assay the relationship between public policy, care and society. The following are primary considerations: choices around receiving care, the choice to give care, gender equity, the legitimising of care, the welfare mix, public as against private expenditure, the demand for and supply of paid and unpaid labour. Having considered some of the main variations which are to be found in European welfare states' handling of care, the article goes on to conjecture about possible outcomes of a range of policy responses on the basis of the above considerations. All provisions have particular strengths and weaknesses but ‘quality’, understood in a broad sense, is elusive to any single measure.