Global health and the law.

Innovative Use of the Law to Address Complex Global Health Problems; Comment on “The Legal Strength of International Health Instruments - What It Brings to Global Health Governance?”

Addressing the increasingly globalised determinants of many important problems affecting human health is a complex task requiring collective action. We suggest that part of the solution to addressing intractable global health issues indeed lies with the role of new legal instruments in the form of globally binding treaties, as described in the recent article of Nikogosian and Kickbusch. However...

Adopting New International Health Instruments – What Can We Learn From the FCTC?; Comment on “The Legal Strength of International Health Instruments - What It Brings to Global Health Governance?”

This Commentary forms a response to Nikogosian’s and Kickbusch’s forward-looking perspective about the legal strength of international health instruments. Building on their arguments, in this commentary we consider what we can learn from the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) for the adoption of new legal international health instruments.

Tapping the Power of Soda Taxes: A Call for Multidisciplinary Research and Broad-Based Advocacy Coalitions – A Response to the Recent Commentaries

Navigating Between Stealth Advocacy and Unconscious Dogmatism: The Challenge of Researching the Norms, Politics and Power of Global Health

Global health research is essentially a normative undertaking: we use it to propose policies that ought to be implemented. To arrive at a normative conclusion in a logical way requires at least one normative premise, one that cannot be derived from empirical evidence alone. But there is no widely accepted normative premise for global health, and the actors with the power to set policies may use...

The Untapped Power of Soda Taxes: Incentivizing Consumers, Generating Revenue, and Altering Corporate Behavior

Globally, soda taxes are gaining momentum as powerful interventions to discourage sugar consumption and thereby reduce the growing burden of obesity and non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Evidence from early adopters including Mexico and Berkeley, California, confirms that soda taxes can disincentivize consumption through price increases and raise revenue to support government programs. The Unit...

Health System Reform in the United States

In 2010, the United States adopted its first-ever comprehensive set of health system reforms in the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Implementation of the law, though politically contentious and controversial, has now reached a stage where reversal of most elements of the law is no longer feasible. The controversial portions of the law that expand affordable health insurance coverage to most U.S. cit...