• DOI:10.1007/s10728-019-00377-7
• Corpus ID: 195878311

Neo-Liberalism, Austerity and the Political Determinants of Health

@article{Viens2019NeoLiberalismAA,
  title={Neo-Liberalism, Austerity and the Political Determinants of Health},
  author={A. M. Viens},
  journal={Health Care Analysis},
  year={2019},
  volume={27},
  pages={147 - 152}
}

• A. Viens
• Published 11 July 2019
• Political Science
• Health Care Analysis

We should think of medicine as a social science, according to Virchow, because he understood the various ways in which social inequality is a contributor to and cause of ill-health. With social inequality having a central impact on the ability of people and populations to be healthy, it is political action around these states of affairs that determines the extent of our success in the prevention and mitigation of ill health. But this relationship is not merely descriptive, it is also normative in two important ways. First, the social environment, and not individual factors, is what makes living healthy lifestyles difficult to sustain. This makes collective action and adequate funding necessary to assure the social conditions under which people can be healthy a shared responsibility across society—providing a vital role for the state in these efforts [7]. Second, the social mission and social machinery needed to understand and advance the state’s health responsibilities to assure conditions under which people can be healthy establishes a key role for political morality in determining what forms and means of co-ordination is required to meet these responsibilities [6]. These normative considerations demonstrate that ill health and social inequalities are not merely matters for epidemiologists to map and measure—they are also of central concern to moral and political theorists to understand why there is an imperative to address them and establish the means by which it would be justified to do so. Crucially, however, the state can also use its power and political action to adopt ideological and policy positions that promulgate ill health and health inequality. A neo-liberal political ideology and its use of economic policies such as austerity have had a devastating effect on health and health equity.