Health Justice In India

This book presents important fields of research in public healthcare in India from an interdisciplinary and health systems perspectives. Discussing how the exchange of power between the health justice triad, viz., the State (judiciary as the arm of the State), legal and medical professions, and civil society, cumulatively shapes the outcomes of health justice for citizens, it provides insights into India’s juridico-legal processes and of seeking justice in healthcare. It critically assesses civil society’s counter-hegemonic role in bolstering justice in health care and examines the potential of transforming health care jurisprudence into health justice. Repositioning the social right to healthcare as integral to social citizenship and social justice, and opening avenues for inter-professional and interdisciplinary power discourse in public health policy research, the book is of interest to academics, practitioners, students, researchers, and the wide academic community working in public health care issues broadly.

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

In Faith-Based Health Justice, a stellar assembly of scholars mines critical insights into the promotion of health justice across Christian and Islamic faith traditions and beyond. Contributors to the volume consider what health justice might mean today, if developed in accordance with faith traditions whose commandment to care for the poor, ill, and marginalized lies at the core of their theology. And what kind of transformation of both faith traditions and public policies would be needed in the face of the health justice challenges in our turbulent time? Contributors to the volume come from a wide range of backgrounds, and the result will be of interest to scholars and students in social ethics, development studies, global theology, interreligious studies, and global health as well as experts, practitioners, and policy-makers in health and development work.

Equity and Access attempts to unravel the complex narrative of why inequities in the health sector are growing and access to basic health care is worsening, and the underlying forces that contribute to this situation. It draws attention to the way globalization has influenced India’s development trajectory as healthcare issues have assumed significant socio-economic and political significance in contemporary India. The volume explains how state and market forces have progressively heightened the iniquitous health care system and the process through which substantial burden of meeting health care needs has fallen on the individual households. Twenty-eight scholars comprising social scientists, medical experts, public health experts, policy makers, health activists, legal experts, and gender specialists have delved into the politics of access for different classes, castes, gender, and other categories to contribute to a new field ‘health care studies’ in this volume. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach within a broader political-economy framework, the volume is useful for understanding power relations within social groups and complex organizational systems.

This open access handbook, the first of its kind, provides a comprehensive and carefully curated multidisciplinary and genre-spanning view of the state of the field of Critical Menstruation Studies, opening up new directions in research and advocacy. It is animated by the central question: ‘“what new lines of inquiry are possible when we center our attention on menstrual health and politics across the life course?” The chapters—diverse in content, form and perspective—establish Critical Menstruation Studies as a potent lens that reveals, complicates and unpacks inequalities across biological, social, cultural and historical dimensions. This handbook is an unmatched resource for researchers, policy makers, practitioners, and activists new to and already familiar with the field as it rapidly develops and expands.

This book examines the potential of litigation as a strategy to advance the right to health by holding governments accountable for these obligations. It asks who benefits both directly and indirectly—and what the overall impacts on health equity are. Included are case studies from Costa Rica, South Africa, India, Brazil, Argentina and Colombia.

Have gaps in health outcomes between the poor and better off grown? Are they larger in one country than another? Are health sector subsidies more equally distributed in some countries than others? Are health care payments more progressive in one health care financing system than another? What are catastrophic payments and how can they be measured? How far do health care payments impoverish households? Answering questions such as these requires quantitative analysis. This in turn depends on a clear understanding of how to measure key variables in the analysis, such as health outcomes, health expenditures, need, and living standards. It also requires set quantitative methods for measuring inequality and inequity, progressivity, catastrophic expenditures, poverty impact, and so on. This book provides an overview of the key issues that arise in the measurement of health variables and living standards, outlines and explains essential tools and methods for distributional analysis, and, using worked examples, shows how these tools and methods can be applied in the health sector. The book seeks to provide the reader with both a solid grasp of the principles underpinning distributional analysis, while at the same time offering hands-on guidance on how to move from principles to practice.