Published by Counterpunch, February 9th 2009

President Obama has put forward the name of Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the well-known chief medical correspondent for CNN, for the position of surgeon general of the U.S. Public Health Service – the chief public health officer of the federal government. Dr. Gupta has received wide acclaim as the most important voice on medical matters in the U.S. broadcasting industry. And CNN has played an important role in developing and promulgating the U.S. establishment’s conventional wisdom on what is happening in the country’s medical care. Dr. Gupta has been a major force in the promotion of that wisdom. Continue reading »

Published by Counterpunch, September 7th 2009

Why Obama Needed Single Payer on the Table

Let me start by saying that I have never been a fan of Barack Obama. Early on, I warned many on the left that his slogan, “Yes, we can,” could not be read as a commitment to the major change this country needs (see “Yes, We Can. Can We? The Next Failure of Health Reform”). Continue reading »

Original article by Antonio Daponte Codina, Julia Bolívar Muñoz, Silvia Toro Cárdena, Ricardo Ocaña Riola, Joan Benach Rovira and Vicente Navarro López

Published in the Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, 2008

See PDF

Published by International Journal of Health Services, Volume 38, Number 4, Pages 597-606, 2008. December 2008

This article analyzes why people in the United States have major problems in accessing medical care that are due to financial constraints. The author suggests that the cause of these problems is the way in which medical care and elections are funded in the United States, with private sources being the largest component in the funding of both activities. The article includes a comparison of funding of the electoral process in the United States with similar electoral processes in the countries of the European Union, and postulates that privatization of the funding of U.S. elections (primary and general) is responsible for privatization of the funding of medical care—the root of people’s problem in paying for their medical care. Privatization of election funding gives undue power to the economic, financial, and professional groups that dominate medicine in the United States. Continue reading »

For the Progressive Summer University of Catalonia (UPEC).
Interviewed by Vincent Navarro. at M.I.T., Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 13, 2008. Vincent Navarro is Professor of Public Policy at the Pompeu Fabra University, and The Johns Hopkins University. Continue reading »

Published in Harvard Health Policy Review. July 2008

The U.S. and European political cultures are very different

I appreciate the invitation from the Harvard Health Policy Review to discuss the relationship between national health care systems and the policy process. Continue reading »