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.

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.

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
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.

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.

Citations

• Introducing Health Politics
  Haejoo Chung, Carles Muntaner
  Health Politics.2026; 1(1): e001.     CrossRef