This article provides a commentary to Ole Norheim’ s editorial entitled “Ethical perspective: Five unacceptable trade-offs on the path to universal health coverage.” It reinforces its message that an inclusive, participatory process is essential for ethical decision-making and underlines the crucial importance of good governance in setting fair priorities in healthcare. Solidarity on both natio...

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC or Commission) has been very active in enforcing antitrust laws in the health care field for the past two decades. The staff has investigated a wide variety of cases covering a broad range of restrictions on competition. These cases can be divided into three basic types of cases in health care: (1) mergers and acquisitions, (2) horizontal restraints cases or ag...

A rapid expansion of trade liberalization in Thailand during the 1990s raised a critical question for policy transparency from various stakeholders. Particular attention was paid to a bilateral trade negotiation between Thailand and USA concerned with the impact of the 'Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Rights (TRIPS) plus' provisions on access to medicines. Other trade liberalization effec...

The World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) World Health Report 2010, “Health systems financing, the path to universal coverage,” promoted universal health coverage (UHC) as an aspirational objective for country health systems. Yet, in addition to the dimensions of services and coverage, distribution of coverage in the population, and financial risk protection highlighted by the report, the conside...

Concerns regarding the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) have raised awareness about the negative public health impacts of trade and investment agreements. In the past decade, we have learned much about the implications of trade agreements for public health: reduced equity in access to health services; increased flows of unhealthy commodities; limits on access to medicines; and constrained policy...

Globalization of trade, marketing and investment has important implications for public health, both negative and positive. This article considers the implications of the single package of World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements for public health research and policy, focusing on three themes: commodities, intellectual property rights, and health services. The main aims of the analysis are as f...