Background Commercial determinants of health (CDOH) are increasingly recognised as central to health inequities, yet CDOH scholarship has not consistently engaged with established health equity theories. As a result, CDOH research often invokes equity without clearly articulating the mechanisms through which commercial power translates into unequal health outcomes. This review addresses this conceptual gap by examining how health equity theories can be used to interpret and organise CDOH scholarship and clarify where theoretical engagement is strongest and where key gaps remain.
Methods A theory-informed interpretive review was conducted using purposive sampling of influential conceptual papers and review literature in the CDOH field. Six established health equity explanations and theories were used as interpretive lenses: cultural-behavioural, materialist, and psychosocial perspectives; fundamental cause theory, the Diderichsen model, and life course theory. Included documents were analysed for explicit engagement with these frameworks, conceptual alignment, and unrealised opportunities for theorising mechanisms linking commercial practices to health inequities.
Results CDOH scholarship most clearly aligns with cultural-behavioural explanations through its emphasis on how corporate actors shape consumption patterns and risk environments. Engagement with materialist and psychosocial perspectives is growing but remains comparatively limited. Fundamental cause theory and the Diderichsen model offer underutilised tools for specifying how corporate power contributes not only to differential exposure but also to social stratification, differential vulnerability, and unequal social consequences of illness. Life course perspectives remain notably underdeveloped.
Conclusion By placing CDOH research in dialogue with established health equity theories, this analysis clarifies both where the field has developed explanatory strength and where deeper engagement with health equity theory is lacking. The analysis demonstrates that CDOH are embedded within and actively shape the social, economic, and political structures that produce and sustain health inequities. Future research should therefore move beyond exposure-centred analyses to examine how corporate power drives social stratification, differential vulnerability, and unequal consequences across the life course. In doing so, CDOH scholarship can more fully explain how commercial actors contribute not only to immediate harms, but to the enduring reproduction of structural health inequities over time.
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Introducing Health Politics Haejoo Chung, Carles Muntaner Health Politics.2026; 1(1): e001. CrossRef
Background Crisis-driven policymaking often unfolds under conditions of urgency and heightened political pressure, producing policies portrayed as neutral but embedding assumptions that obscure power asymmetries and deepen existing inequities. A literature review revealed a scarcity of policy analysis instruments capable of evaluating the gendered and intersectional equity-promoting potential of public policies.
Purpose This paper describes the development of a sex- and gender-based analysis plus (SGBA+) tool designed to assess whether COVID-19 public policies meaningfully consider equity and inclusion.
Approach The tool’s development followed an iterative process involving a mapping literature review, a structured planning and design phase, piloting with Canadian pandemic policies, and consultation with community organizations working with population groups facing marginalization or exclusion.
Findings The resulting tool comprises 81 questions across six policy dimensions, with a scoring system that rates policies from “unequal” to “transformative” based on their responsiveness to gender and intersecting social identities. While validity and reliability have not yet been tested, the tool fills an identified gap in equity-oriented policy analysis.
Implications With adjustments, the tool could be applied to public policies adopted in response to health, environmental, and economic crises. By making visible how policy design distributes resources and risks, SGBA+ approaches offer policymakers, advocates, and researchers a concrete means to interrogate decision-making and guide emergency governance toward greater equity.
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Background After encountering funding problems in the 1980s, the French healthcare system is now facing new types of public problems that trigger organizational responses. This is the case with the growing shortage of medical workforce since the 2000s—particularly GPs—leading to geographical inequalities in access to primary care. The expression “medical desert” has since flourished in political discourse and the press, contributing to the dramatization of the problem and pushing it to the top of the political agenda. At the same time, we are witnessing the development of a new repertoire of policy instruments that make primary care—and GPs in particular—the cornerstone of the healthcare system.
Objective Based on an empirical qualitative analysis, this paper highlights the key role played by a new “instrument constituency” (Béland & Howlett, 2015; Voß & Simons, 2014) in the primary care reform process. This constituency consists of a small group of GPs —open to team-based practice, the integration of psychosocial dimensions of health, and changes in payment methods— playing the role of professional entrepreneurs, and the established “Welfare elite” —composed of political actors and civil servants who share reform objectives regarding health policies.
Approach The paper adopts a processual approach, first focusing on the formation of this instrument constituency (around a specific organizational model: the multi-professional healthcare centers), then its gradual institutionalization through successive reforms (e.g., new financing methods and territorial integration of healthcare services) and the evolution of this instrument constituency (more specifically, the evolution of the roles and positions of its members).
Findings The instrument constituency progressively institutionalized through new financing methods and territorial integration of healthcare services, extending to new professional and political actors. However, the persistence of the “medical deserts” problem and the proliferation of competing policy instruments have recently weakened this constituency.
Implications The paper raises the question of the constituency’s sustainability in the current context of increasing conflicts in the French healthcare system, and opens a broader discussion on the role of instrument constituencies in policy change.
Background The post–World War II institutional order that structured social protection and public health governance is under sustained strain, yet no coherent alternative has consolidated. Planetary, technological, and social transformations are simultaneously reshaping who lives, who receives care, and whose suffering is normalized. Political configurations are now more decisive for health and health equity than at any point in the postwar period.
Problem Scholarship on health politics remains fragmented across disciplines, theoretically under-developed in its treatment of power relations, and methodologically limited in its capacity for causal inference. Existing journals either publish health politics research as a secondary concern within broader portfolios or lack the editorial infrastructure to integrate the theoretical and methodological traditions the field requires. No journal currently centres theories of power and institutions as applied to health.
Aim To establish Health Politics as a dedicated, interdisciplinary journal for rigorous, policy-relevant research that explains how power, institutions, and political conflict shape health and health equity.
Approach The journal bridges political science, political economy, political sociology, and public health. It is anchored in the political economy of health tradition while engaging theories of power, institutions, and political processes from across the social sciences. It combines methodological pluralism with a quantitative edge, emphasizing causal inference alongside qualitative depth and comparative analysis.
Illustrative cases Four current examples demonstrate how politics shapes health under crisis conditions: the politicization of vaccination policy, war and humanitarian restrictions in Gaza, climate disaster response in Canada, and platform power and adolescent mental health in EU and United States. Each case reveals distinct political mechanisms through which power produces health consequences.
Contribution A new scholarly home for power-aware, methodologically rigorous health research that fills a structural gap in the journal landscape and provides an interdisciplinary platform for the emerging field of health politics.
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A key structural characteristic of the Korean medical system is that the public share of total medical expenditure is low, and the provision of medical services relies primarily on the private sector. These structural characteristics emerged within the context of World War II, the end of the war, the Cold War system, and the expansion of global neoliberalism. Even amidst colonialism, authoritarian regimes, and the abuses of development-oriented governments, there were counter-movements that resisted through independence, democratization, and the strengthening of public services. In this process of co-evolution, specific policies related to the healthcare system often became the concrete manifestations of this struggle. The partial achievements attained by civil society and labor movements—such as the establishment of workers’ hospitals, the integration of health insurance, and the prevention of healthcare privatization—were made possible by progress in the broader context of independence and democratization.
Currently, the Korean healthcare system is facing three major crises: (1) constant pressure for privatization and commercialization of healthcare services, (2) sustainability of the healthcare system amid rapid aging, and (3) explosive growth of science and technology driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and the resulting weakening of civil, labor, and social rights.
The outcome of the new crisis currently facing South Korea’s healthcare system will also be determined by the multilayered political dynamics between dominant and countervailing forces at the global, national, and collective levels. The history of co-evolution between politics and the healthcare system that South Korean society has built thus far will provide useful insights not only for Korea but also for other nations facing similar situations in their efforts to establish better healthcare systems.
Drawing on our book Neoliberal Epidemics: How politics makes us sick (2nd edition, 2025), this article sets out how neoliberalism - the hegemonic political–economy of the last 50 years - has operated as a powerful upstream determinant of population health acting through four interlocking and mutually reinforcing pathways: widening socioeconomic inequality, chronic psychosocial stress, pervasive economic and social insecurity, and the growing power of the commercial determinants of health. Together, these pathways explain how political and economic choices translate into biologically embodied health outcomes over the life course. We illustrate our argument with a case study of austerity. Following Virchow’s insight that politics is medicine “on a large scale”, we conclude that under neoliberalism, health inequalities are inevitable. Addressing them therefore requires public health to confront the political and economic structures that systematically generate stress, insecurity, inequality and commercial harm, rather than relying on downstream or individual‑level interventions.
Background Health outcomes and inequalities are shaped by political processes, yet the vocabulary used to describe this relationship—“health politics,” “politics of health,” “politics of public health,” “politics of health policy,” and “political determinants of health” (PDoH)—is applied inconsistently and has not been systematically examined.
Objectives To map how “politics” is conceptualized when these focal terms are used across the health and social science literature, and to clarify how PDoH relates to the broader health-politics vocabulary.
Methods In this scoping review, we searched Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed for articles published between 1976 and 2025 and conducted a term-in-use analysis of 457 included records (329 using politics-of-X terms; 128 using PDoH). Using directed qualitative content analysis, two independent coders classified the dominant conceptualization of each focal term into seven categories (policy process; governance and accountability; interest group politics; critical power analysis; social movements; political economy and welfare state; and ethics and normative reasoning), with almost perfect inter-rater agreement (screening κ = 0.94; primary-category κ = 0.90).
Results Conceptual usage was dominated by policy process (31.3%) and critical power analysis (26.9%), which together accounted for 58.2% of records, with the remaining categories comparatively sparse. The politics-of-X and PDoH corpora shared this conceptual core in nearly equal proportion (each ≈ 58%) but differed in emphasis: PDoH was more often framed through critical power analysis and structurally oriented categories (political economy, governance), whereas politics-of-X terms more often invoked actor- and process-centered framings. Multiple correspondence analysis recovered two interpretive axes, contrasting structural/critical with agential/process usage and conceptual with applied usage.
Conclusions “Health politics” operates not as a single bounded concept but as a label organized around two loosely connected conceptual traditions—an applied, process-centered one and a critical, structurally oriented one—while PDoH sits within this structure as a critically and structurally inflected specialization rather than a departure from it. The resulting mid-range typology offers a shared vocabulary for more cumulative research on the political drivers of health.
Research on East Asian welfare states has often emphasized regime typologies while paying less attention to the political contestation shaping health policy trajectories. This theoretical/conceptual article develops a historical-institutional framework for understanding Taiwan’s health politics beyond National Health Insurance (NHI). Drawing on official policy documents, legislative materials, ministerial statements, civil society publications, and scholarly literature, the article argues that Taiwan’s health politics is organized by two durable cleavages: the tension between technocratic cost containment and electorally driven expansion, most visible in NHI financing politics, and the tension between public care provision and household-based migrant care labor, most visible in long-term care. Tracing the trajectory from NHI’s establishment in 1995 through LTC 1.0, LTC 2.0, the 2026 launch of LTC 3.0, and the 2024 to 2025 changes to migrant caregiver hiring rules, the article shows that these cleavages tend to generate asymmetric outcomes: incremental expansion, delayed fiscal adjustment, and continued reliance on stratified care labor. By linking long-term care policy to political contestation, labor regulation, and welfare governance, the article contributes to comparative debates on aging, care systems, and welfare state development in East Asia.
Background Japan’s postwar welfare state developed around the universal Statutory Health Insurance System (SHIS), a complex public–private arrangement involving diverse insurers, providers, and government actors. Because most healthcare providers operate outside direct government control, the regulation of healthcare organizations and the setting of SHIS payment rates have remained central concerns in Japanese healthcare politics. However, the diversity of institutional arrangements and policymaking processes across different healthcare policy arenas has received limited systematic attention.
Methods This paper conducts an institutional analysis of policy documents, media reports, and scholarly literature to examine Japanese healthcare politics over the past three decades.
Results The paper begins by outlining the institutional structure of the SHIS and the key actors involved. It then examines four major arenas of healthcare policymaking: consensus-building in national councils, biennial revisions of medical fees and drug prices, system-wide health insurance reforms, and healthcare delivery reforms involving complex central–local relations. The analysis further considers how these arenas are affected by recent political transformations. These transformations include stronger political leadership, shifts in party competition, and intensifying conflicts over cost containment and cost-sharing. The analysis also highlights the emerging but uneven influence of patient voices and public opinion; while these forces remain structurally limited overall, they can occasionally prove decisive.
Conclusion Rather than constituting a single unified process, contemporary healthcare politics in Japan is best understood as a differentiated system in which multiple policy processes coexist across distinct arenas. At the same time, changing political structures are reshaping distributive conflicts—increasingly centered on patient cost-sharing—within a healthcare system historically committed to universal coverage.
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