Shaping Global Health Policy Global Social Policy Actors and Ideas about Health Care Systems

This book investigates global social policy in the field of health. While legal or regulatory obligations to run health systems have primarily remained at the level of national governments, the ideational and discursive exchanges about suitable models, appropriate reforms, and socially protective arrangements extends to various transnational forums across multiple scales. Using an approach that combines transnational and comparative social policy analysis with international relations, Shaping Global Health Policy assesses various global social policy actors and compares their ideas and prescriptions about national health care systems. These comprise governmental and non-governmental organisations, including the World Health Organisation, World Bank, International Labour Organisation, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, World Trade Organisation, the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, G8, G20, BRICS, and CSOs ('Global Health Watch'). The book particularly focuses upon the ensemble of health provision, financing and regulation to a comprehensive system of health and social protection. How global social policy actors guide specific national health policies is illustrated with the case of Polish health care reform in transition. Crucially, the book highlights the multiplicity of actors and the importance of considering health policies across multiple scales.

Alexandra Kaasch is Junior Professor in Transnational Social Policy at Bielefeld University, Germany. She has previously published Transformations in Global and Regional Social Policies (edited with Paul Stubbs, Palgrave Macmillan 2014) and The Welfare State as a Crisis Manager (with Peter Starke and Franca van Hooren, Palgrave Macmillan 2013). She is editor of the Global Social Policy Digest.

1. Global Social Policy Actors and Health Care Systems Ideas

2. UN Organisations: Health for All and All for Health Care Systems?

3. The OECD and the WTO: Outside the UN but Increasingly Important?

4. The New Centres of Power? G8, G20 and the BRICS and Health Care Systems

5. The Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria: A Hybrid Organisation as the Best Health Care Systems Actor?

6. Non-Governmental Organisations and Health Care System Ideas

7. The Polish Health Care System Under Global Scrutiny

8. Conclusions: Multiple Actors, Uncertain Ideas, Nested Discourses