2005 Health in Foreign Policy Forum

AcademyHealth Launched
its First Health in Foreign Policy Forum
on February 4, 2005

While domestic health policy and foreign policy experts have traditionally had little interaction, in the last decade globalization has widened the nexus between these two fields. More and more health policy challenges stretch across borders, and even powerful nations like the U.S. have found that they can no longer ensure the health of their citizens through national policies alone. This growing interdependence has meant that there are new challenges that require both health policy and foreign policy perspectives.

In an effort to facilitate an inter-disciplinary dialogue between the two fields on these important, complex, and highly controversial policy challenges, AcademyHealth launched its first Health in Foreign Policy Forum on February 4, 2005, in Washington, D.C. The meeting followed the annual National Health Policy Conference, co-sponsored by AcademyHealth and Health Affairs.

The forum provided an overview of the issues that have emerged at the intersection of health and foreign policy, and will emphasize the different professional and political perspectives that currently compose public policy debates.

The agenda focused on three broad areas, as follows:

I. GLOBAL COMMERCE AND HEALTH: The recent wave of multilateral and bilateral free trade agreements includes previsions on the exchange of “goods” that affect health and health care, e.g., pharmaceuticals, food, and tobacco, as well as “services”, e.g., health tourism, multinational health insurance and the migration of health workers. These trade agreements have been at the epicenter of debate over how to balance the need to protect U.S. market opportunities without endangering “global public goods”. Drug pricing policies, intellectual property rights, exportation of genetically modified foods, the “brain drain” and expansion of the U.S. health insurance industry abroad, are but a few of the topics that have sparked public controversies.

II. DISEASE AND INTERNATIONAL SECURITY: With the threat of terrorism a primary focus of U.S. foreign policy, many believe that public health preparedness is far more important than it was in the Cold War era. While there is wide recognition of the need to improve our capacity to prevent and to respond to bioterrorism, there is also an awareness that infectious diseases are spreading more rapidly across borders due to international travel and trade. The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) served as an alarm, demonstrating the need for improved international cooperation and new international regulations. Similarly, the AIDs epidemic in Africa has painfully illustrated the power of disease to devastate economies and to contribute to the kinds of “failed States” that are likely breeding grounds for terrorism. Debates have juxtaposed human rights-based approaches and national security approaches to these problems.

III. DEVELOPMENT AID AND PUBLIC HEALTH PREPAREDNESS: The number and types of actors engaged in international humanitarian and development aid is far great today than it was ten years ago. Powerful NGOs and major new funding agencies, such as The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, have altered the international health scene. And a series of new international initiatives, such the US Millennium Challenge Accounts and the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS, Malaria and TB, manage vast sums of money. Even the U.S. military has extended its role beyond protecting the health of its personnel abroad to the rebuilding of health systems in deployment areas. Debates center on whether such efforts have actually improved public health preparedness, if not why, and whether there should be a more coherent strategy among these actors.

The Forum will bring together experts from each of these areas in an attempt to understand the complexity of the problems and the differing perspectives that are competing to influence U.S. policies.

2005 Agenda & Presentation Slides