• Mario Hernández-Álvarez, Juan Carlos Eslava-Castañeda, Liliana Henao-Kaffure, José Orozco-Díaz, and Luis Edgar Parra-Salas.
• Research Group Estudios sociohistóricos de la salud y la protección social (Socio-Historical Studies of Health and Social Protection), Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia. mehernandeza@unal.edu.co.
• Int J Public Health. 2020 Sep 1; 65 (7): 995-1001.

ObjectivesTo analyze the fundamentals of the global health agenda from 1944 to 2018, especially regarding Universal Health Coverage, in order to unveil its relations with capital accumulation in health services and to contribute to world social mobilization to change this tendency.MethodsA historical study was carried out based on a purposeful selection of primary sources on the global health agenda from multilateral organizations and secondary sources about the changes of capitalism from the study period.ResultsThe global health agenda changed from the state responsibility for health to an insurance healthcare system based on markets. The medical-industrial complex pressured national economies, broke postwar pacts, and urged economic globalization. The neoliberal, neoclassical, and neo-institutional discourse that promoted a new state-market relationship eased the new capital accumulation in healthcare into financial and cognitive capitalism.ConclusionsUnderstanding these relationships allows us to provide elements for social mobilization geared to transform the healthcare sector toward a new vision of health with a nature-society relationship that contributes to socially constructing human and environmental health, rather than gaining profits based on illness and chronic suffering.

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