To Live and Die in America: Class, Power, Health and Healthcare

Description

Reviled as one of the worst healthcare providers in the world, the United States has among the worst indicators of health in the industrialised world, whilst paradoxically spending significantly more on its health care system than any other industrial nation. Economists Robert Chernomas and Ian Hudson explain this contradictory phenomenon as the product of the unique brand of capitalism that has developed in the US. It is this particular form of capitalism that analogously created social and economic conditions that influence health, such as, highly industrialised labour that produced chronic disease amongst the labouring classes, alongside an inefficient, unpopular and inaccessible health care system that is incapable of dealing with those same patients. In order to improve health in America, the authors argue that a change is required in the conditions in the capitalist system in which people live and work, as well as a restructured health care system. Title page Copyright page Dedication page Contents List of figures and tables Acknowledgments 1 Class, power, health, and healthcare Introduction Competing theories of health outcomes The rest of the book 2 The medical miracle? Illness under early industrialization in the United States and the United Kingdom Modern illness The medical diagnosis The corporate influence on medical science Conclusion 3 To live and die in the nineteenth-century United States: a class-based explanation of the rise and fall of infectious disease The casual holocaust The context for infectious disease in the United Kingdom: overworked, underpaid, overcrowded, and insanitary Poverty and insecurity Environmental conditions The UK transition The context for infectious disease in the United States: overworked, underpaid, overcrowded, and insanitary Poverty and insecurity Conditions of work Environmental conditions Employers and the state confront unions over the social determinants of health The US transformation Poverty and inequality Conditions of work Living conditions: housing, sanitation, and public health Conclusion 4 Death in our times: the exceptional class context for chronic disease in the United States Food Environment Work Stress at work Unemployment and insecurity Occupational illness Inequality The recent US political economy: a turn for the worse Regulation Declining funding Trade agreements as a social determinant of health Industry influence on regulations Labor market changes Conclusion 5 The political economy of US healthcare: the medical industrial complex Class interests: the evolution of the medical industrial complex The early years: the AMA Modern America: insurance and corporate medicine The results of the dominance of the MIC The insurance industry For-profit hospitals and healthcare services The pharmaceutical industry Profits in the MIC Economics in support of the MIC Predictable: Obama’s healthcare plan Conclusion 6 Three easy lessons Safety first: the REACH program Equality, economic growth, and health Universal, single-payer, public health insurance in Canada Conclusion Bibliography Index