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

by Robert Chernomas (Joint Author), Ian Hudson (Joint Author)

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.

Author Biography

Robert Chernomas is Professor of Economics at the University of Manitoba, Canada. He has been a visiting professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and is on the editorial board of International Journal of Health Services.

Ian Hudson is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Manitoba, Canada. He is the co-author (with Robert Chernomas) of The Gatekeeper: Sixty Years of Economics According to the New York Times (2012), Social Murder and Other Shortcomings of Conservative Economics (2008), and (with Mark Hudson and Mara Fridell) Fair Trade, Sustainability and Social Change.