Howard Waitzkin’s Medicine and Public Health at the End of Empire

Matthew Anderson

Authors

Matthew Anderson Department of Family and Social Medicine, Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Montefiore Medical Center, USA

Abstract

I first heard Howard Waitzkin’s thesis that “US capitalism as we have known it has ended, and em-pire in its previous form has ended” at the Interna-tional Association of Health Policy in Europe (IAPHE) conference in Ankara, Turkey on Sunday, October 2, 2011. I must admit I was skeptical of these ideas. Certainly, only the previous year the Obama administration had stepped in to massively subsidize the US financial sector and take over two major US automobile manufacturers; this clearly had nothing to do with the declared rules of a capitalist economy. However, public subsidization of private enterprises has been common throughout US history. True, there was evidence that the US empire has been weakened, yet were we not still involved in a massive war on terror that seemed to have no discernible end? Was it really time to speak of an end of capitalism and empire?

Author Biography

Matthew Anderson, Department of Family and Social Medicine, Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Montefiore Medical Center, USA

BA Physical Anthropology MA Social Medicine PhD Sociocultural Anthropology Full time professor. Research area: Health and society, Graduate Program in Physical Anthropology, National School of Anthropology and History. Member of the Promoting Group of ALAMES in Mexico.