Primary Submission Category: Structural factors
Neoliberalism and the U.S. population health deviation: Investigating the mechanisms driving international differences & maintaining sub-national inequities
Authors: Maren Spolum,
Presenting Author: Maren Spolum*
Multiple scholars investigating the U.S. health disadvantage have called for further analysis into the timing of the U.S. health deviation in life expectancy from OECD peer countries in the early 1980s. That timing is important because the conjuncture in the U.S. political-economic system embracing neoliberalism aligns temporally with a stark and sustained deviation in life expectancy between the U.S. and international peer nations. This presentation will offer a brief history of neoliberalism in the United States, which was introduced in the U.S. in the 1940s, integrated within the Nixon and Carter administrations in the 1970s, before being unleashed at the federal policy making level in 1981, when President Ronald Reagan assumed office. Since then, it has been the primary mode of governance across subsequent Democrat and Republican administrations. This presentation will offer a framework for understanding neoliberalism beyond a set of economic processes, but as a political project and a system of power, that reconfigured relationships between the state, civil society and market actors. It will then present an analytic framework connecting this historically grounded understanding of neoliberalism, to the decline in US population health metrics and the maintenance of US health inequities.