By the Health/PAC Archives Workgroup
Press release, March 25, 2013
Before there was an Internet, with blogs, listservs and web pages to turn to, there was the Health/PAC (Policy Advisory Center) Bulletin, a hard-hitting and muckraking U.S. journal of health activism and health care system analyses and critiques.
A new website, www.healthpacbulletin.org, contains a complete and searchable digital collection of Health/PAC’s influential articles, which were published from 1968 through 1993. The site is easily accessible and free.
During the bulletin’s quarter-century existence, Health/PAC staffers and authors in New York City (and, for a brief time, in a West Coast office in San Francisco) wrote and spoke to health activists across the country on every issue from free clinics to women’s health struggles to health worker organizing to environmental justice.
Health/PAC both reported on what was going on and reflected back on a wide variety of strategies and tactics to build a more just health care system – a conversation that continues today.
Health/PAC coined the terms “medical empire” and “medical-industrial complex” to capture the ways the profit motive distorted priorities in the American health care system. It critiqued big Pharma and rising health care costs, explored the differing forms of health activism, and made it clear that a seemingly disorganized health care system was in fact quite organized to serve ends other than health care.
Its first book, “The American Health Empire” (1970), published by Random House, brought its analysis to national attention. Other edited collections of the Bulletins followed: “Prognosis Negative” (1976) and “Beyond Crisis” (1994).
Many of today’s leading health activists, reformers and policy scholars got their start at Health/PAC.
The new website adds immeasurably to the resources documenting the history of mid- to late-20th-century American health policy and politics. Activists, scholars, journalists, practitioners, professors, and students will all find these bulletins a source of useful analysis and information. This is not only a way to learn about the late 20th-century history, but to consider why certain issues continue to plague our health system.
The site is a work in progress and its editors welcome feedback and suggestions. It was a real labor to get these collected and available and we hope readers will find the site a useful resource.
For more information, please contact the archives workgroup at contact@healthpacbulletin.org.
Merlin Chowkwanyun, Feygele Jacobs, Ronda Kotelchuck and Susan M. Reverby for the former HEALTH/PAC staff and board.
The Health/PAC Archives Workgroup: Merlin Chowkwanyun, Feygele Jacobs, Susan Reverby, Ronda Kotelchuck, David Rosner, Oliver Fein and Robb Burlage.