Health politics or politics of health is an interdisciplinary field of study concerned with the analysis of social and political power over the health status of individuals.

Health politics, incorporating broad perspectives from medical sociology to international relations, is interested not only in the understanding of politics as government or governance, but also politics as civil society and as a process of power contestation. It views this wider understanding of politics to take place throughout levels of society — from the individual to the global level. As such, the politics of health is not constrained to a particular area of society, such as state government, but rather is a dynamic, ongoing social process that takes place ubiquitously throughout our levels of society.

Health politics is a joint discipline between public health and politics. Like many other interdisciplinary fields such as sociology, phenomenology or public policy, health politics incorporates approaches and methodologies of other related fields of study such as intersectionality. It examines the political nature of health and healthcare within the wider public health and medical contexts.

An early publication in the discipline of health politics was a 1977 article by P.J. Schmidt titled "National Blood Policy, 1977: a study in the politics of health" which focused on policy in the United States. Through his work in biopolitics, French philosopher Michel Foucault also offered insight into health politics through his 1979 essay "The politics of health in the eighteenth century" (English translation by Lynch, 2014).

A key issue that health politics engages with is the apolitical nature of health within academia, health professions, and wider society. As an interdisciplinary area of study, it is seen as under-researched, with literature focusing on the social and cultural determinants of health at the lack of political ones.

By integrating analysis on social power and politics within health and healthcare systems, a better understanding of barriers in health inequality and inequity can be gained.

It critiques public health for professionalizing health and healthcare systems to an extent that it removes it from public engagement, depoliticizing it in the process. This then transfers power away from the public body and into the medical profession and industry such that they can 'determine what health is and, therefore, how political it is (or, more usually, is not)'. Combining political science with the study of public health, health politics aims to understand the unique interplay of politics within this policy domain to locate the politics of health.

"Among professionals in public health, the political system is commonly viewed as a subway's third rail: avoid touching it, lest you get burned. Yet it is this third rail that provides power to the train, and achieving public health goals depends on a sustained, constructive engagement between public health and political systems."