In this guest post, Dr. Margaret Moss talks about the health of American Indians and how it has been shaped through historical traumas related to US federal policy. Dr Moss is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of North Dakota and an Associate Professor at the Yale School of Nursing.

Growing commentary has covered much ground on the causes, faults, and promise of the Occupy Wall St. movement. However, a stone that has yet to be overturned is the one that should have public health professionals, as well as anyone who cares about the health of their community, taking to the streets.

Taking root in Wisconsin, the union battles that are sweeping across the Midwest are about more than pay, benefits and collective bargaining. Attacks on the rights of workers are also an attack on America’s health.

By recognizing that health lies outside the medical system, US public health professionals acknowledge that health should no longer be defined as the responsibility of doctors. By accepting that health is amenable to political interventions, they should therefore also accept that its promotion becomes the responsibility of political actors.

On Monday, NPR’s On Point Radio was meant to host a show discussing how “inequality hurts societies”. The show was postponed however, in order to provide immediate coverage of the Tucson shooting incident. Ironically, a conversation about inequalities in societies could have brought some new perspective to the already redundant media commentaries which name violent political rhetoric, gun law, or the assassin’s mental health as sources of the tragedy.

Can collaboration with civil society organizations encourage action on the SDOH at the policy level? Just Health Action (JHA), a non-profit organization based in Seattle, Washington gives me hope.

In the absence of a US health equity commission, how about a return to Roosevelt’s remedy for an ailing nation— FDR’s Second Bill of Rights would guarantee: The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation; The right to earn enough to provide adequate [...]

Tune in Thursday July 29 at 2 pm Eastern Daylight Saving Time for a webinar presented by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation titled “A new way to talk about the social determinants of health”. For more information and to register go here.

In May 2009, the World Health Assembly called on national governments to politically commit to tackle health inequities and to embrace the principles outlined in the final report of World Health Organization’s (WHO) Commission on Social Determinants of Health (CSDOH). In my last post, Healthy Policies looked at a recent Lancet debate over who owns [...]

A couple of weeks ago, Obama was featured on the front page of the New York Times, laughing in an Iowa bookstore while holding up a copy of  Mitt Romney’s book, ‘No Apology’ and Karl Rove’s book, ‘Courage and Consequence’. On tour celebrating the passage of health care reform legislation, he joked that’d he’d wait [...]