Socialist Register: 2010: Health Under Capitalism

A survey of the political economy of health. Morbid Symptoms focuses on the economic, social and political determinants of health under global capitalism, and on health care as an object of struggle between commercial forces seeking to make it into a field of profit, and popular forces fighting to keep it - or make it - a public service with equal access for all. Contributors survey structures of power and forces for change in national health care systems - from the UK, Germany and the USA to India, China, Sub-Saharan Africa and Cuba. They examine the impact of neo-liberal hegemony on the health industry, the WTO and the WHO; they consider key issues of international health policy: the marketisation of public health service HIV/AIDS in Africa; the control of medical research and training; the misuse of scientific data for commercial gain; the mistreatment of mental illness, the food industry's production of obesity and hunger, and the turning of genes into commodities.