ABSTRACT
While global capitalism has resulted in impressive technological innovations, including ones in biomedicine and health care delivery, it is a system fraught with contradictions, including an incessant drive for economic expansion, growing social disparities, undemocratic practices that undermine its claims of equality, militarist and imperialist practices, depletion of natural resources, and environmental degradation (including global warming and associated climatic changes). All of these contradictions entail numerous consequences for people’s health and access to health care. The contradictory features of global capitalism are intertwined (e.g., military ventures wreck havoc on the environment and significantly deplete natural resources while promoting global social inequality), and hence it is hard to fully analyze one contradiction separate from the others. Each is so complex in its relationship to health, however, that it requires the kind of detailed single-issue examination presented in this book.
