introduction of satisfactory artificial feeding, such sustenance was also a vital factor in the lives of orphans and foundlings, for whom the alternative was direct feeding from such animals as goats. That the subject can sustain an entire book may seem surprising; however, recognizing its potential during research for her earlier work, Breasts, bottles and babies, Valerie Fildes has produced a...

This executive summary of Judith Miller Jones' remarks was prepared by Julie Snyder of the University of Texas LBJ School of Public Affairs. The remarks were given in the context of a panel presentation moderated by Jones, entitled "Politics of Health Policy: Yesterday and Today."

Although the influence of democracy in preventing famines has been reported, there have been no empirical studies on the relation between the extent of freedom allowed by political regimes and the effect on a nation’s health. We explored the effect of democracy on life expectancy and maternal and infant mortality in most countries, taking into account a country’s wealth, its level of inequality...

Today's talk about any health issue is part of a wider web of neoliberal destructive processes of which all fall into the category of discriminating populations and their cultures, downgrading their right to life and violating their human dignity. Poor health, poverty stricken health systems and screaming epidemiological factors make just one more triangle of the successive visible consequences...

Martin Powell makes the point that the death of the National Health Service (NHS) is constantly asserted without criteria. This article suggests that the NHS is many things, which makes criteria unstable. The alignment of interests in the structure of the NHS enables both overheated rhetoric and political strength, and that pluralization of provision might actually undermine that alignment over...

This commentary reflects on the contribution of this editorial and its “Three Challenges That Global Health Networks Face” to the totality of the framework developed over the past decade by Shiffman and his collaborators. It reviews the earlier works to demonstrate that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts in providing a package of tools for analysis of network effectiveness.   Additi...

This paper analyzes the politics of paying for health care reform. It surveys the political strengths and weaknesses of major options to fund universal coverage and explores obstacles to changing how the United States finances health care. Finding a politically viable means to finance universal coverage remains a central barrier to enacting health reform.

members of the 67th world health assembly in 2014 were presented with a framework document to guide world health organization (who) engagement with non-state actors, a key part of who reform kick-started in 2011. according to this document, non-state actors include four distinct constituencies: i) nongovernmental organizations (ngos), ii) private sector entities; iii) philanthropic foundations;...

A recent editorial by Naoki Ikegami has proposed three key lessons from Japan’s experience of achieving virtually universal coverage with primary healthcare services: the need to integrate the existing providers of primary healthcare services into the organised health system; the need to limit government commitments to finance hospital services and the need to empower providers of primary healt...