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Health politics or politics of health is an interdisciplinary field of study concerned with the analysis of social and political power over the health status of individuals.
Health politics, incorporating broad perspectives from medical sociology to international relations, is interested not only in the understanding of politics as government or governance, but also politics as civil society and as a process of power contestation. It views this wider understanding of politics to take place throughout levels of society — from the individual to the global level. As such, the politics of health is not constrained to a particular area of society, such as state government, but rather is a dynamic, ongoing social process that takes place ubiquitously throughout our levels of society.
An early publication in the discipline of health politics was a 1977 article by P.J. Schmidt titled "National Blood Policy, 1977: a study in the politics of health" which focused on policy in the United States. Through his work in biopolitics, French philosopher Michel Foucault also offered insight into health politics through his 1979 essay "The politics of health in the eighteenth century" (English translation by Lynch, 2014).
By integrating analysis on social power and politics within health and healthcare systems, a better understanding of barriers in health inequality and Health equity can be gained.
It critiques public health for professionalizing health and Health system to an extent that it removes it from public engagement, depoliticizing it in the process. This then transfers power away from the public body and into the medical profession and industry such that they can 'determine what health is and, therefore, how political it is (or, more usually, is not)'. Combining political science with the study of public health, health politics aims to understand the unique interplay of politics within this policy domain to locate the politics of health.
"Among professionals in public health, the political system is commonly viewed as a subway's third rail: avoid touching it, lest you get burned. Yet it is this third rail that provides power to the train, and achieving public health goals depends on a sustained, constructive engagement between public health and political systems."
Here, public health's problems and issues are explicitly political, as the world's health bodies and organizations are supported by national governments — making their solutions equally political as well. "If public health is the field that diagnoses and strives to cure social ills, then understanding Politics causes and cures for health problems should be an intrinsic part of the field."
Here, it is predominantly a critique of the social determinants of health in its perceived failure to incorporate political factors within its framework or its having a limited conceptualization of what politics can entail. PDOH outlines that politics is not merely an institutional process, of government acting upon an individual. Rather, politics is a multifaceted contestation of social power (e.g., the ability to enact change upon someone else) that takes place throughout the social determinants of health. Although government agencies and policy are important, seeing political contestation and politics as power operating across levels of analysis offers to seek out the cause of the causes.
PDOH is set within the social determinants of health, but acknowledges that political processes and contestation over power form a unique social phenomenon that require a distinct conceptualization to appreciate their impact upon health and healthcare. Rather than stopping at social determinants like sexual orientation, educational level, or food insecurity, it encourages an explicit exploration of the causes of these determinants such as Neoliberalism market failures, homophobia, or poverty.
"We have understanding only of inorganic capital and know nothing about human capital. In a wholly capitalist economy, where the loss of human life is considered only as a private loss for the family but as no economic loss for society, the economy of people becomes, of course, completely superfluous."
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