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The new stakes for healthcare policy in the U.S. are apparent in what Obamacare concretized — the further privatization and stratification of healthcare—and what it left unsaid—the assertion of a right to health. Solutions lie outside of the formal domain of policy and in the realm of ethics and human rights. Yet, it is hard to imagine the application of these remedies at a time when life can be taken with impunity and in a world in which the US kills through drone warfare with each bomb carrying not only the threat of death but also the message that some lives matter less than yours or mine.

Claire Richard asks Alondra Nelson about a neglected and yet essential legacy of the Black Panther Party. When the party emerged in 1966, the Jim Crow laws had been dismantled and there was no legal support for discrimination in the United States, but there were still segregated practices within the healthcare sector. As the saying goes, when America has a cold, African Americans have pneumonia. The Black Panthers fought for healthcare equality as a way to achieve social justice. Alondra Nelson tells us about the clinics they created where they did basic healthcare but also screening and vaccination programs. They were asking for a universal healthcare system which the USA still don't have today...

Since 1980 the NHS has been converted from a planned, integrated service, to a set of quasi-businesses operating in a health care market, in which an increasingly significant role is being played by for-profit corporations. This policy was initiated by the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher and John Major but continued and driven much further by the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The paper outlines the sequence of initiatives through which the transformation has been accomplished and assesses what has driven the change, and why it has been so relatively easy to accomplish.