This week on From the Vault we look at health care in the United States by listening to the status of health care around the world in a 1976 recording called Sickening Societies. Sickening Societies serves to examine not only the cause of health problems in different regions of the world, but also to illustrate the different approaches countries employ to combat illness. A leading matter of debate in the 2009 health care reform movement is how to lower the overall cost of health care while increasing its effectiveness — reformers have proposed a shift from a curative, technical, hospital-based system to a preventative-based system. Sickening Societies gives us a real life example of the effect of the health care shift by looking at the results of this change in Chile beginning in 1970. This program integrates recordings from the First International Conference on the Political Economy of Health, held in Amsterdam in the summer of 1976.
From the Vault is presented as part of the Pacifica Radio Archives Preservation and Access Project.