The Edinburgh Companion to the Politics of American Health

This collection examines the diverse, and often conflicted, political status of health in the USA from World War II to Covid-19. It moves beyond biomedical conceptions by using the lenses of class, poverty, race, gender, sexuality and locality to study the concepts, policies and lived realities of U.S. healthcare and medicine.

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Bringing together forty-five experts from the US, Canada and the UK and across a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, this companion is unique in its broad assessment of the ways in which health has become an increasingly politicised concept over the last seventy-five years. It takes a multi-layered view of the development of US health care by examining its political dimensions from historical, cultural, medical, sociological, legal, ethical and environmental perspectives. Chapters consider major health institutions and the federal policies that guide them, but also explore the intersection between health and social movements, the contours of health and illness with respect to race, gender, sexuality, age and region, and the often-conflicted role the US plays in the world when it comes to health governance. The book emphasises the plurality of health experiences, balancing national and transnational perspectives with the lived realities of diverse communities that propel this groundbreaking study far beyond biomedical conceptions of health.