Corporate Efforts to Adopt and Distort the Social Determinants of Health Framework

Over the past two centuries, progressive scholars have highlighted the health-harming effects of oppressive living and working conditions. Early studies delineated the roots of inequities in these social determinants of health in capitalist exploitation. Analyses in the 1970s and 1980s that adopted the social determinants of health framework emphasized the deleterious effects of poverty but rarely explored its origins in capitalist exploitation. Recently, major U.S. corporations have adopted and distorted the social determinants of health framework, implementing trivial interventions that serve as rhetorical cover for their myriad health-harming behaviors, and the Trump administration cited social determinants to justify imposing work requirements for persons seeking health insurance through Medicaid. Progressives should raise the alarm against the use of social determinants of health rhetoric to bolster corporate power and undermine health.