When it comes to climate change, gun control, and abortion rights, the U.S. Supreme Court is on a minority rule roll, with grave consequences for the health of people and life on Earth. Its June 2022 decisions to limit the ability of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to regulate climate-heating emissions, to overturn gun control legislation, and to overturn Roe v. Wade not only will harm health and increase health inequities, but also flout public opinion. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, is not alone in being out of step with majority views: so too are state and federal elected officials. For effective action, it is imperative for health professionals not only to marshal evidence of harms posed by actions such as the Supreme Court decisions, but also to contribute to efforts to understand and address how changing the "rules of the game"-for example, through gerrymandering and voter suppression-is enabling branches of the U.S. government to undermine not only use of scientific evidence but also majority rule.

Hailed as a major reform, the No Surprises Act (NSA) is a profoundly conservative law that aims neither to reform design of insurance, to regulate fees, nor to limit health care spending. The NSA mitigates a perverse but narrow problem: unpredictable and uncontrollable high out-of-pocket bills for individuals who are unable to receive care within their insurance network. However, the NSA neglects to address the broader high medical costs, limited choice of caregivers, and the resulting insecurity and unfairness that characterize American health care. It allows caregivers to extract high payments and insurers to restrict choice of caregivers. Insurers can continue to employ ineffective cost controls that generate unpredictable high out-of-pocket costs for patients-and high levels of denial of payments to doctors and hospitals. The law amputated the most politically and visibly gangrenous consequences of unregulated private insurance in the United States in ways that enable business as usual in private health insurance to persist, subject to unnecessarily complex arbitration rules that magnify administrative waste.

Health care is central to sustainable development, but it is underfunded in many developing countries such as Nigeria. This study empirically examined gender variations and inequity in health care financing in Southeast Nigeria. To decompose the Gini coefficient and analyze inequity by gender and differences in health care financing among states in the region, Dagum's approach for decomposition of the Gini coefficient is used. Empirical results showed that gender inequity exists in health care financing in Southeast Nigeria. In addition, variations in health care financing inequity among states in the Southeast region were found. Based on the foregoing, the study recommends that when implementing health care financing reforms, different population groups be covered in order to achieve the broader equity and effectiveness goals. Furthermore, governments in various states should step up efforts to assist disadvantaged and oppressed communities, such as poor indigenous people, in terms of health care utilization, which could reduce the health care financing burden.

The factors impacting life expectancy (LE) are important to a country as LE reflects the essential quality of its population. Previous studies showed that other than economic factors, health status and resources (HSR) and sociodemographic (SD) also affect LE. This area has not been previously studied in Bahrain, especially in the past five decades. Hence, this study aims to develop an explanatory model for HSR, macroeconomic (ME), and SD factors on LE in Bahrain. The research was a retrospective, time-series design that collected the annual published data on SD, ME, HSR, and LE in Bahrain's population from 1971 to 2020. The data were analyzed using the partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) method. The result shows that ME (0.463, P < .001) and HSR (0.595, P < .001) have significant direct effects on LE. ME has an indirect effect (0.488, P < .001) on LE via SD and HSR, and SD has an indirect effect (0.496, P < .001) on LE through HSR. During the socioeconomic downturn, the health resources provision should not be reduced as it directly affects LE. An integrated policy addressing socioeconomic and health-related factors could protect the future of Bahrain's population health outcomes.

In this article, we examine the effects of high temperatures on hospital visits and mortality in Finland. This provides new information of the topic in a context of predominantly cool temperatures. Unique, individual-level data are used to examine the relationship at the municipality-month level over a span of 20 years. Linear regression methods alongside high-dimensional fixed effects are used to minimize confounding variation. Analysis is conducted with special emphasis on the elderly population, as well as on specific elderly risk groups identified in previous literature. We show that for an additional day per month above 25°C, monthly all-cause mortality increases by 1.5 percent (95% CI: 0.4%-2.6%) and acute hospital visits increase by 1.1 percent (95% CI: 0.7%-1.6%). We also find some evidence that these effects are elevated in selected population subgroups, the low-income elderly, and people with dementia. Hospital visits also increase among younger age groups, illustrating the importance of using multiple health indicators. Such detailed evidence is important for identifying vulnerable groups as extreme heat waves are expected to become more frequent and intense in northern countries.

This article analyzes the relationship between various forms of intimate partner violence (IPV) and unmet need for family planning (FP) in South Asia. The data were obtained from the latest wave of the Demographic and Health Survey in Afghanistan, India, Maldives, Nepal, and Pakistan. Binary logistic regression analyses show mixed results, with a significant association between at least one type of IPV and unmet need for FP in all countries under study, except Maldives. There were also contrasting findings on the IPV-unmet need nexus, with a positive sign in some but negative sign in others. Women who experienced physical violence were associated with a higher odds of having an unmet need in Pakistan, but the opposite was true in Afghanistan and Nepal. The odds of having an unmet need were higher among Indian women who experienced IPV (sexual and emotional). In Afghanistan, women who experienced IPV (physical and emotional) have lower odds of having an unmet need. However, the interaction analysis of IPV (physical and sexual) and partners' controlling behavior showed a positive association with unmet need. Policymakers need to develop policies and strategies to prevent IPV and reduce unmet need for FP, in line with the Sustainable Development Goals.

The objective of this article is to assess the dominant global economic system and the resulting power relations from the perspective of the strategies used worldwide against the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. The predominantly biomedical approach has not sufficiently taken into account the actual dimension of COVID-19 as a syndemic. While the much longer-term pandemic caused by the neoliberalism virus has not been systematically considered by public and global health scholars in the context of COVID-19, it exhibits essential characteristics of an infectious pathogen, and the symptoms can be described and detected according to biomedical criteria. Even more, the severity of leading symptoms of neoliberalism such as growing inequities calls for immunization campaigns and ultimately herd immunity from viral neoliberalism. However, achieving worldwide immunity would require an anti-neoliberal vaccine, which is extremely challenging to develop vis-à-vis the power relations in global health.

Health development in the Papua region often lags behind other areas of Indonesia. The study aims to analyze the role of government-run insurance in primary health care utilization in the Papua region, Indonesia. The study examined 17,879 Papuan. The study used primary health care utilization as an outcome variable and health insurance ownership as an exposure variable. The study also employed nine control variables: province, residence, age, gender, marital status, education, employment, wealth, and travel time to primary health care. The research employed data using binary logistic regression in the final analysis. The results show that Papuans with government-run insurance were three times more likely to utilize primary health care than uninsured Papuans (AOR 3.081; 95% CI 3.026-3.137). Meanwhile, Papuan with private-run insurance were 0.133 times less likely to utilize primary health care than uninsured Papuans (AOR 0.133; 95% CI 0.109-0.164). Moreover, Papuans who have two types of health insurances (government-run and private-run) were 1.5 times more likely to utilize the primary health care than uninsured Papuan (AOR 1.513; 95% CI 1.393-1.644). The study concluded that government-run insurance increases the chance of primary health care utilization in the Papua region, Indonesia. Government-run insurance has the most prominent role compared to other health insurance categories.

Every year, 8 million small arms and 15 billion rounds of ammunition are manufactured in the world. Every day, 700 people worldwide (more than 2.5 million in a decade) die from firearms such as pistols, shotguns, assault rifles, or machine guns. Between 1968 and 2011, there were 1.4 million gun-related deaths in the United States (including suicides, homicides, and accidents) compared with 1.2 million North American deaths in all wars. This article looks at the historic and cultural context that has generated and shaped the U.S.'s "gun culture" and prevailing mentality regarding the right to bear arms, critiquing the vision that such a pro-arms mentality is an intrinsic and unchangeable element of U.S. culture. It exposes the neoliberal roots of the current U.S. gun violence epidemic, asking the question of "why?" in order to move toward an alternative conventional wisdom and overcome this urgent public health crisis in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Existing frameworks seek to elucidate the social, political, and commercial determinants of health in order to inform practice, policy, and research that can improve health and reduce health inequities. Each approach has widened the scope of public health practice and research and identified new partners and targets for intervention. But as the public health crises of the past decade have shown, these frameworks have not yet yielded insights that have enabled the public health profession and movement to prevent or overcome dominant threats to global health and health equity. This report explores the value of an integrated framework that combines insights from previous scholarship and practice using the social, political, and commercial determinants of health. It proposes the questions such an integration would need to answer and suggests processes and tasks that could lead to the creation of a blended framework.

This study examines the effect of democracy on public health by using panel data of 188 countries over the period 1972-2019. We use various regression methods, such as pooled ordinary least squares, fixed effects, dynamic generalized method of moments (GMM), a split-sample method, and a quadratic model to address econometric issues. The pooled regression supports the positive effect on health, but it does not exist in low-income countries, which can be explained by the threshold effect. The fixed effects regression confirms the positive impact on infant mortality but not on life expectancy, which illustrates the historical and cumulative effect of democracy on life expectancy. The non-linear regression finds a U-shaped relationship between democracy and infant mortality, which is consistent with the fixed effects regression result of the positive effect on mortality in the low-income group. The dynamic GMM regression shows the expected strong relationship between previous health and current health status. Overall, the regression analysis supports the positive effect of democracy on public health.

COVID-19 outbreak quickly spread to all corners of the globe. In Brazil, the outbreak was particularly frightening because it worsened existing health, political, economic, and social problems. The results already observed show the contagion ripple-spreading process across the country, causing the death of thousands of people each day and counting, added to a very serious wave of unemployment, scientific denial, and social precariousness. Based on this, this study reviews recent research that looked at the role of the government, the Brazilian health system, and the main economic and social impacts fostered by the pandemic. We perform a scoping review according to the PRISMA-ScR to structure the qualitative synthesis of the 67 associated documents. The results reinforce the negative effects of the country's mismanagement and its consequent impacts on the Brazilian economy and society. The battleground against COVID-19 has fueled political tensions, shaken the health system, and unleashed social despair tinged with thousands of deaths. Finally, in the present scoping review, we discuss concerns about the impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak in Brazil and what the world hopes the country has learned from the current crisis.

The concept of the social determinants of health has become increasingly accepted and mainstream in anglophone public health over the past three decades. Moreover, it has been widely adopted into diverse geographic, sociocultural, and linguistic contexts. By recognizing the role of social conditions in influencing health inequalities, the concept challenges narrow behavioral and reductive biological understandings of health. Despite this, scholars and activists have critiqued the concept of the social determinants of health for being incomplete and even misrepresenting the true nature of health inequities. Arguably, these critiques have been most thoroughly developed among those working in the Latin American social medicine and collective health traditions who formulated the "social determination of health" paradigm and the concept of interculturality decades prior to the advent of the social determinants of health. We draw on Jaime Breilh's main works, with a focus on the recently published book, Critical Epidemiology and the People's Health, to (1) provide a broad overview of the social determination of health paradigm and its approach to interculturality and (2) clarify how these ideas and the broader collective health movement challenge assumptions within the social determinants of health concept.

On May 12, 2022, Senator Bernie Sanders held a hearing in the U.S. Senate Budget Committee on Medicare for All legislation. These were the first such hearings in the U.S. Senate. In testimony presented to the Budget Committee, I argued that the achievement of Medicare for All was a medical and moral imperative. I explored the problem of uninsurance, noting that 30 million Americans remain uninsured at a cost of more than 30,000 deaths annually. I contended that improving the quality of coverage was equally crucial, describing how some 41 million Americans remain underinsured at a grave cost to their health and financial wellbeing. Finally, I examined the economics of Medicare for All reform, and showed how the reduction of the enormous administrative waste in American healthcare could save hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Medicare for All, I concluded, is the one health reform that could expand and improve coverage for all while simultaneously controlling costs.

The Vira Vida program promotes the health of adolescents and young adults, ages 16 to 24, who have been sexually exploited. It has served more than 3000 individuals in 18 Brazilian states. The objective of this research was to estimate the costs of Vira Vida and compare them with the costs of detention policies for juveniles under 18. This program cost study considers two periods: 2008 to 2012 (Cycle 1) and 2013 to 2014 (Cycle 2). The System S perspective and time horizon for one year were adopted. Direct costs incurred by the National Council of Industry Social Services, which coordinates Vira Vida, and by the Regional Departments (RD), responsible for the direct execution of Vira Vida, were analyzed. The cost of detention measures for adolescents and youngsters under the age of 18 was obtained from the literature. The annual cost per student enrolled in Vira Vida varied between US$ 3754.93 and US$27,244.48, depending on the cycle and the state. Most of the costs of the program were lower than those reported for detention measures for adolescents in Brazilian states. Evidence indicates that health promotion interventions targeting sexually exploited children and adolescents can help their recovery; on the other hand, studies indicate that detention measures do not help adolescents recover.