Main description:

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.

Contents:

Colin Leys: Health, health care and capitalism; Hans Ulrich Deppe: The nature of health care: commodification versus solidarity; David Coburn: Inequality and health; Rodney Loeppky: Certain wealth: Accumulation in the health industry; Kalman Applbaum: Marketing global health care: the practices of big pharma; Marie Gottschalk: US health reform and the Stockholm syndrome; Christoph Hermann: The marketisation of health care in Europe; Pat Armstrong & Hugh Armstrong: Contradictions at work: struggles for control in Canadian health care; Paula Tibandebage & Maureen Mackintosh: Maternal mortality in Africa, a gendered lens on health system failure; Julie Feinsilver: Cuban health politics at home and abroad; Shaoguang Wang: China's double movement in health care; Mohan Rao: 'Health for All' and neoliberal globalisation: an Indian rope trick; Meri Koivusalo: The shaping of global health policy; Robert Albritton: Between obesity and hunger: the capitalist food industry; Lesley Henderson: Medical TV dramas, health care as soap opera; Sanjay Basu: Building a comprehensive public health movement, learning from HIV/AIDS mobilizations; Julian Tudor Hart: Mental health in a sick society: what are people for?