The recent financial meltdown has brought notable changes to the global practice of health care changes that have often escaped the American news media. Although Western managed-care corporations previously had strengthened their influence abroad, now many countries are considering new approaches to health care for their citizens.The untold story of how corporations have influenced global health care and the impacts now in America as the system rapidly shifts is Dr. Waitzkin s subject in his provocative new book. We now live in a new era in which the prospects for more humane approaches to health care are taking root. Strengthening access and improving public health are at the heart of the many previously little-noted struggles and actions by individuals, groups, and whole nations to put control back in the hands of patients and practitioners, as Americans of many political stripes seem to universally seek. The impacts of these changes in the United States are considerable, and they are amply illustrated by Dr. Waitzkin as the United States attempts to reorient its own system of care.Selected as the 2012 winner of the Freidson Outstanding Publication Award by the American Sociological Association for its "bold and timely analysis of the global political economy of contemporary crises in health and medical care. By presenting the lessons learned from social medicine (past and present), [it] outlines a macro-sociologically informed response to these crises.""

Howard Waitzkin

Part 1 Empire Past; Chapter 1 Empire's Historical Health Component; Chapter 2 Illness-Generating Conditions of Capitalism and Empire; Chapter 3 The International Market for Health Products and Services; Chapter 4 Paths of Resistance to Empire in Public Health and Health Services; Part 2 Empire Present; Chapter 5 Neoliberalism and Health, Rebeca Jasso-Aguilar; Chapter 6 International Trade Agreements, Medicine, and Public Health; Chapter 7 Macroeconomics and Health; Chapter 8 The Exportation of Managed Care; Chapter 9 Corporations, International Financial Institutions, and Health Services; Chapter 10 The "Common Sense" of Health Reform; Chapter 11 Stakeholders' Constructions of Global Trade, Public Health, and Health Services; Chapter 12 Militarism, Empire, and Health; Part 3 Empire Future; Chapter 13 Health and Praxis; Chapter 14 Resistance and Building an Alternative Future, Rebeca Jasso-Aguilar;