Many important issues of health policy, such as whether government should provide universal health insurance, raise fundamental questions about the proper scope of government and the fair allocation of resources in society. Norman Daniels’s new book, Just Health, presents a carefully reasoned approach to answering such questions. The book is by design a successor to an earlier work, Just Health Care (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), in which, as the title indicates, Daniels focused on equity in the provision of health care. In the more than two decades since the earlier work’s publication, extensive research has shown that although health care is important, health status depends heavily on factors such as education, the environment, behavior, and socioeconomic status. One of Daniels’s principal goals in Just Health is to integrate these insights into his analysis. The result is a much more comprehensive study of the role that health should play in social policy, broadly defined to include even the economic and political structures of society.
Read the full New England Journal of Medicine book review, here. The author serves as the inspirational and philosophical footing for this particularly well established healthcare blog, which says:
CRUD’s guiding philosophy is rooted in Norman Daniels’ call for greater transparency in health policy making processes. In a BMJ article, Daniels writes that “[a] fair process requires publicity about the reasons and rationales that play a part in decisions. There must be no secret where justice is involved, for people should not be expected to accept decisions that affect their well being unless they are aware of the grounds for those decisions.”
See that blog entry, here. See also:
Public Health: What It Is and How It Works
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Introduction to Public Health, Third Edition
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Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health
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A History of Public Health
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