ABSTRACT
The Global Financial Crisis of 2007/08 caused a crisis in economic thinking, and created a space for alternative political-economic thinking. Following COVID-19, a similar, but more nascent, challenge is emerging to orthodox health economics. Focusing on the case of the NHS in the UK, this chapter explores how a focus on critical political economy exposes the limits of the welfare state’s existing approach to health creation, and why the NHS is not the apex of state intervention in health. It explores how the state could play a deeper, more transformative role in health creation – one that better and more formally accounts for the complex social determinants of health. It also explores how neoliberal governance makes this shift difficult. Accordingly, as evidenced by the global COVID-19 pandemic, while a more progressive role of the state in shaping the political economy of health and healthcare is both possible and necessary, realizing such change will be neither easy nor uncontested.
