The Importance of Health Policy

Well-known health policy leaders around the world have argued in recent years that “health” represents much more than the positive result of a well-functioning health care system or the absence of disease. Enlightened leaders now acknowledge that health is an active state of well-being encompassing mind, body and spirit. It is the capacity to reach one’s full human potential, and on a larger scale, a nation’s leading edge of development. Health is a preferred state of being, rather than a set of disconnected functions or services.

That’s why national or global health policy is so important. Health policy can profoundly affect the entire direction of a society. Leaders debate health policy constantly, but seldom consider it holistically, free of the silos that have traditionally compartmentalized health policy issues.

HealthPolitics.com addresses “health” in a more integrated way, viewing health and health policy as a profoundly political concept with far-reaching consequences on individuals and their societies. A society's health policy is a collection of resources unequally distributed in society. Health’s “social determinants” such as housing, income and employment are critical to the accomplishment of individual, family and community well being and are themselves politically determined. Changes and improvements in health, health care and health systems requires political debate about health policy and a political consensus about necessary health policy changes .

For individuals – as well as full societies -- to achieve “health” as a preferred state of being, the long-term ramifications of health policy and the unique politics of health must be examined as a complex, interrelated mix of variables. That’s why this website goes beyond basic considerations of health policy to a much fuller examination of issues found at the “intersection of health and policy.”