"Post"-pandemic Capitalism: Reform or Transform? Comment on "Ensuring Global Health Equity in a Post-pandemic Economy".

This commentary expresses appreciation for Professor Labonté's work, along with some hopefully constructive suggestions. Professor Labonté's editorial shows ambivalence about reforms within capitalism. Such reforms remain contradictory and unlikely to prevail.

How missing evidence-based medicine indicators can inform COVID-19 vaccine distribution policies: a scoping review and calculation of indicators from data in randomised controlled trials.

Objective: Reports of efficacy, effectiveness and harms of COVID-19 vaccines have not used key indicators from evidence-based medicine (EBM) that can inform policies about vaccine distribution. This study aims to clarify EBM indicators that consider baseline risks when assessing vaccines' benefits versus harms: absolute risk reduction (ARR) and number needed to be vaccinated (NNV), versus absolute risk of the intervention (ARI) and number needed to harm (NNH).

Methods: We used a multimethod approach, including a scoping review of the literature; calculation of risk reductions and harms from data concerning five major vaccines; analysis of risk reductions in population subgroups with varying baseline risks; and comparisons with prior vaccines.

Universal health coverage as hegemonic health policy in low- and middle-income countries: A mixed-methods analysis.

Universal health coverage (UHC) has become an influential global health policy. This study asked whether and to what extent UHC became a "hegemonic" health policy. The article consists of three parts: a historical timeline of UHC's rise, a bibliometric analysis of UHC in the literature, and a qualitative thematic analysis of how UHC is defined and the thematic content of those definitions.

COVID-19 as Cause versus Trigger for the Collapse of Capitalism.

According to the official narrative of COVID-19, the pandemic has caused the global capitalist economy to collapse, or at least to enter a deep recession and possibly a great depression. Assigning blame to a virus takes attention away from the structural contradictions and instabilities of capitalism that would have led to a crash in any case. This narrative also helps justify non-evidence-based public health policies, including lockdowns, travel bans, closed schools and factories, and forced quarantines of large populations rather than individuals and clustered groups who harbor the infection.

Confronting the Upstream Causes of COVID-19 and Other Epidemics to Follow.

The upstream causes of the COVID-19 pandemic have received little attention so far in public health and clinical medicine, as opposed to the downstream effects of mass morbidity and mortality. To resolve this pandemic and to prevent even more severe future pandemics, a focus on upstream causation is essential. Convincing evidence shows that this and every other important viral epidemic emerging in the recent past and predictably into the future comes from the same upstream causes: capitalist agriculture, its destruction of natural habitat, and the industrial production of meat.

Moving Beyond Capitalism for Our Health.

Deepening crises now affect not only the capitalist health system in the United States, but also the national health programs of countries that have achieved universal access to services. In our recent collaborative book, , we analyze these changing structural conditions and argue that the struggle toward viable national health programs now must become part of a struggle to move beyond capitalism. Privatization, cutbacks in public-sector services and institutions, and public subsidization of private profit-making through transfer of tax revenues into private insurance corporations have worsened under neoliberal policies.

Military Personnel Who Seek Health and Mental Health Services Outside the Military.

Background: Although research conducted within the military has assessed the health and mental health problems of military personnel, little information exists about personnel who seek care outside the military. The purpose of this study is to clarify the personal characteristics, mental health diagnoses, and experiences of active duty U.S.

The History and Future of Neoliberal Health Reform: Obamacare and Its Predecessors.

The Colombian reform of 1994, through a strange historical sequence, became a model for health reform in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Officially, the reform aimed to improve access for the uninsured and underinsured, in collaboration with the private, for-profit insurance industry. After several historical attempts at health reform adhering to the neoliberal pattern, favored by international financial institutions and multinational insurance corporations, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) similarly enhanced access by corporations to public-sector trust funds.

Erratum to "Place as a predictor of health insurance coverage: A multivariate analysis of counties in the United States" [Health Place 34 (2015) 207-214].

[This corrects the article PMC6528484.].

Place as a predictor of health insurance coverage: A multivariate analysis of counties in the United States.

This study assessed the importance of county characteristics in explaining county-level variations in health insurance coverage. Using public databases from 2008 to 2012, we studied 3112 counties in the United States. Rates of uninsurance ranged widely from 3% to 53%.

The effects of behavioral health reform on safety-net institutions: a mixed-method assessment in a rural state.

In July 2005, New Mexico initiated a major reform of publicly-funded behavioral healthcare to reduce cost and bureaucracy. We used a mixed-method approach to examine how this reform impacted the workplaces and employees of service agencies that care for low-income adults in rural and urban areas. Information technology problems and cumbersome processes to enroll patients, procure authorizations, and submit claims led to payment delays that affected the financial status of the agencies, their ability to deliver care, and employee morale.

Advancing the business creed? The framing of decisions about public sector managed care.

Relatively little research has clarified how executives of for-profit healthcare organisations frame their own motivations and behaviour, or how government officials frame their interactions with executives. Because managed care has provided an organisational structure for health services in many countries, we focused our study on executives and government officials who were administering public sector managed care services. Emphasising theoretically the economic versus non-economic motivations that guide economic behaviour, we extended a long-term research project on public sector Medicaid managed care (MMC) in the United States.

Promotoras as mental health practitioners in primary care: a multi-method study of an intervention to address contextual sources of depression.

We assessed the role of promotoras--briefly trained community health workers--in depression care at community health centers. The intervention focused on four contextual sources of depression in underserved, low-income communities: underemployment, inadequate housing, food insecurity, and violence. A multi-method design included quantitative and ethnographic techniques to study predictors of depression and the intervention's impact.

Prenatal care utilization for mothers from low-income areas of New Mexico, 1989-1999.

Background: Prenatal care is considered to be an important component of primary health care. Our study compared prenatal care utilization and rates of adverse birth outcomes for mothers from low- and higher-income areas of New Mexico between 1989 and 1999.

Methodology/principal Findings: Prenatal care indicators included the number of prenatal care visits and the first month of prenatal care.

Depressive symptoms and their social contexts: a qualitative systematic literature review of contextual interventions.

Background: Numerous observational studies demonstrate associations between social context and depressive symptoms, yet few intervention trials exist in this arena.

Aims: This review examines intervention trials that explore the impact of contextual change on depressive symptoms.

Methods: Electronic literature databases of PubMed and PsycINFO, bibliographies of retrieved articles and the publicly available internet were searched for English-language articles published between 1997 and 2008.