To Live and Die in America details how the United States has among the worst indicators of health in the industrialised world and at the same time spends significantly more on its health care system than any other industrial nation.

Robert Chernomas and Ian Hudson explain this contradictory phenomenon as the product of the unique brand of capitalism that has developed in the US. It is this particular form of capitalism that created both the social and economic conditions that largely influence health outcomes and the inefficient, unpopular and inaccessible health care system that is incapable of dealing with them.

The authors argue that improving health in America requires a change in the conditions in which people live and work as well as a restructured health care system.

Robert Chernomas is Professor of Economics at the University of Manitoba, Canada. He has been a visiting professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and is on the editorial board of International Journal of Health Services.

Ian Hudson is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Manitoba, Canada. He is the co-author (with Robert Chernomas) of The Gatekeeper: Sixty Years of Economics According to the New York Times (2012), Social Murder and Other Shortcomings of Conservative Economics (2008), and (with Mark Hudson and Mara Fridell) Fair Trade, Sustainability and Social Change.

1. Class, Power, Health and Healthcare
2. The Medical Miracle?
3. To Live and Die in 19th Century America: A Class Based Explanation of the Rise and Fall of Infectious Disease
4. Death in Our Times: The Exceptional Class Context for Chronic Disease in America
5. The Political Economy of US Healthcare: The Medical Industrial Complex
6. Three Easy Lessons
Notes
Index