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Colin Leys and Colin Hay

market-driven politics and the depoliticisation of healthcare

Heather Whiteside

pp. 389-404

Medicine may be age-old but healthcare is not. As a system of organised service provision, healthcare is largely a twentieth-century phenomenon. In spite of (often significant) sub-national differences, broadly speaking there have been two distinct eras in Canada which divide the post-war sociopolitical organisation of public healthcare services: the initial Keynesian welfare state model of de-commodified services and public insurance provision and the current neo-liberal mode of increasingly private, for-profit, commodified health services, which erode the spirit of a collectively oriented public system. Here, the historical bifurcation will be approached from a political economy perspective by linking Colin Leys' description of "market-driven politics' with Colin Hay's theory of depoliticisation.

Publication details

DOI: 10.1057/9781137355621_25

Full citation:

Whiteside, H. (2015)., Colin Leys and Colin Hay: market-driven politics and the depoliticisation of healthcare, in F. Collyer (ed.), The Palgrave handbook of social theory in health, illness and medicine, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 389-404.

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