N    153 Ruth Prince Universal Health Coverage in the Global South: New models of healthcare and their implications for citizenship, solidarity, and the public good Michael 2017; 14: 153–72. In 2010, the World Health Organization (WHO) released a call for all coun- tries to move towards ‘Universal Health Coverage’ (UHC). Te WHO defnes UHC as “ensuring that all people can use the promotive, preventative, curative and rehabilitative health services they need, of sufcient quality to be efective, while ensuring that the use of these services does not expose the user to fnancial hardship” . UHC is described by the WHO’s director as “the single most power- ful concept public health has to ofer” and is included under the Sustainable Development Goals. Te move towards UHC ofers a unique opportunity for interdisciplinary research to study how governments, policy makers, health work- ers, patients and citizens in various countries are addressing questions of health equity, economic inequality, social solidarity and the public good. In this article I outline the issues at stake in the policy focus on UHC and argue that UHC opens up a challenging new research feld in medical anthropology. From social solidarity to commodification of health care Te past three decades which have elapsed since the 1980’ies have seen fundamental shifts in the relationship between the public and the private in the fnancing and distribution of health-care services worldwide. Tere has been a decisive movement away from the post second-world-war social contract, of state provision of public health-care and protection of the public’s health towards a more fragmented distribution of responsibility across public, private for-proft and not-for-proft organizations (1–6). Dur- ing this period, pressure from global fnancial institutions pushed many low-income countries to privatize health-services, and cut state support for health-care. Public health systems have become increasingly enmeshed with market-based solutions to health-care and the privatization of health-care