Health is a term that describes a person’s mental and physical condition. As a more specific definition, health is the state of being free from physical and mental injury or illness. Managing health on a national scale is one of the most heavily-debated policy issues in many countries. Setting up a functioning health system is a challenge that requires the cooperation of many parties across public and private sectors. According to a definition by the World Health Organisation (WHO), a health system "consists of all organizations, people and actions whose primary intent is to promote, restore or maintain health. This includes efforts to influence determinants of health as well as more direct health-improving activities. A health system is therefore more than the pyramid of publicly owned facilities that deliver personal health services. It includes, for example, private providers; behavior change programmes; health insurance organizations and occupational health and safety legislation.”

The United States' health system is often criticized for being overly costly and inefficient. Per capita health expenditure in the United States is the highest in the world and still the United States lag behind other industrialized countries in terms of health indicators such as life expectancy, infant mortality and health insurance coverage. In 2010, 49.9 million Americans didn't have health insurance according to recent data. Health insurance coverage is especially bad in the Hispanic population, of which 30.7 percent didn't have health insurance in 2010, compared to a national average of 16.3 percent. To address this problem, the U.S. Congress enacted the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” as part of a larger health care reform in March 2010. It is designed to extend access to health insurance to over 30 million Americans, but at the same time it mandates a further increase of the already vast government health expenditure. The legislation is highly disputed and there is an ongoing debate about the constitutionality of the PPACA.

Health is not only a political issue, it is also a trillion dollar industry that creates millions of jobs. In the United States, 15.48 million people worked at health service sites in 2009. Hospitals and nursing homes are the largest providers of jobs in the health industry, accounting for more than half of all health jobs in 2009. Another major health-related industry is the pharmaceutical industry. The U.S. pharma industry is the largest in the world. Total pharmaceutical sales in the United States amounted to 334.8 billion U.S. dollars in 2010, representing 42.3 percent of global pharma sales.