The Socialist Register 2010

Morbid Symptoms: Health Under Capitalism

Edited by Colin Leys, Leo Panitch

Health care rights are fought over between commercial forces that seek to make health into a commodity (for those who can pay), and popular forces that seek to reduce gross inequalities and try to make (or keep) health as a public service.

These essays analyze the global health industry: the corporations that sell pharmaceuticals and insurance and push to expand the consumption of goods and services, making health care everywhere a field of capital accumulation.
 

Contents

The Recommodification of Health Care in Contemporary Capitalism (Colin Leys) • The Capitalist Health Industry (Roddy Loeppky) • The Health Care Proletariat (Pat & Hugh Armstrong) • The Marketization of Health Care in Europe (Christoph Herman) • Inequality and Ill-Health (David Coburn) • The Politics of Research and the Neutering of Health Policy (Vicente Navarro) • The Nature of Health Care and the Impact of Commodification (Hans Ulrich Deppe) • What Are People For? Mental Health in a Sick Society (Julian Tudor Hart) • Is a Public Health Care System Possible in the USA? (Marie Gottschalk) • Whatever Happened to Primary Care in India? (Mohan Rao) • Health Care in Sub-Saharan Africa (Maureen Mackintosh) • Cuban Health Care at Home and Abroad (Julie Feinsilver) • International Organizations and Capitalist Health Policies (Meri Koi-vusalo) • China’s Capitalist Transition in Health Care (Wang Shaoguang) • Big Pharma’s Medicalisation of Life and Learning (Kalman Applbaum) • Hunger and Obesity: The Global Capitalist Food Industry (Robert Albritton) • ‘Inverse Medicalization’: The ‘Fitness’ Industry (Julian Ammirante) • A Right to Life?: The Lethal Struggle Over AIDS in Africa (Sanjay Basu) • Medical Aid and Resistance in the ‘Global South’ (Thomas Seibert) • Medical TV Dramas and/or Soap Operas (Lesley Henderson)

About the Authors

Colin Leys is an emeritus professor at Queen’s University Canada and an honorary professor at Goldsmiths College London. His most recent books are The Rise and Fall of Development Theory, Market-Driven Politics, and Total Capitalism. He has been studying and writing about the NHS since the late 1990s.

Leo Panitch is a Distinguished Research Professor, renowned political economist, Marxist theorist and editor of the Socialist Register. He received a B.A. (Hons.) from the University of Manitoba in 1967 and a M.Sc.(Hons.) and PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1968 and 1974, respectively. He was a Lecturer, Assistant Professor, Associate Professor and Professor at Carleton University between 1972 and 1984. He has been a Professor of Political Science at York University since 1984. He was the Chair of the Department of Political Science at York from 1988-1994. He was the General Co-editor of State and Economic Life series, U. of T. Press, from 1979 to 1995 and is the Co-founder and a Board Member of Studies in Political Economy. He is also the author of numerous articles and books dealing with political science including The End of Parliamentary Socialism (1997). He was a member of the Movement for an Independent and Socialist Canada, 1973-1975, the Ottawa Committee for Labour Action, 1975-1984, the Canadian Political Science Association, the Committee of Socialist Studies, the Marxist Institute and the Royal Society of Canada. He is currently a supporter of the Socialist Project.