From Alma-Ata to the Global Fund: the history of international health policy.

'Verticalization' of health care delivery, in one form or another, is the common theme pervading the history of international health policy over the last sixty years. It is often accompanied by radical policies of privatiza- tion of health services, everywhere resulting in people being forced to pay for all services. The failure of the vertical approach, of which the global public-private partnership initiatives are a modernized version, has been well recognized and its reasons are clear: actions on the distal determinants of disease (income, educa- tion, housing, the environment and infrastructure, etc) are overlooked; distribution of services dedicated to specific diseases and interventions (such as AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, etc.) are artificially and temporarily reinforced, creating absurd and harmful forms of competition between services and making even more precarious and inefficient the work of already fragile basic health systems. This article describes the role played in this disturbing historical development by the prevailing economic ideology and its operational arm, the World Bank, with the view to reclaim interna- tional policy making processes and actors that really respond to people's health needs.