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

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.