ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book analyses the existing relations of power and inequality, unmasking both the large-scale political economic processes, the more mundane administrative, accounting, and evaluation practices that reproduce these ongoing inequities. It provides an important critique of the status quo in the field of global health and highlights the importance of social mobilisation to generate political will to address hepatitis C virus treatment access. The book illustrates how models such as the ‘revolving drug fund’ and dogmas about limiting expenditures and the ‘price inelasticity of demand’ for health care helped create global health as a coherent discipline. It discusses how debates about health systems and initiatives to strengthen them cut to the core of the politics of global health and also presents the consequences of social, economic, and cultural globalisation for the health of marginalised people in both the global North and South.
