 The second distinctive feature of public health with significant implications for public health ethics is the large role that government intervention and government power play in public health. So much of what is undertaken to advance public health requires the apparatus and power of the state to be effective. Some go as far as to claim that what makes public health ‘public’ is, at least partly, that public health is the business of the public, as contrasted with private individuals. To these theorists, the distinction between public and private health is not to be found merely in the collective rather than the individual-level focus. Instead, who or what is promoting the health of the populace is relevant (see Coggon 2012; Jennings 2007; Verweij and Dawson 2007; Dawson and Verweij 2008). For instance, in The Future of Public Health, the Institute of Medicine includes the following definition: “Public health is what we, as a society, do collectively to assure the conditions in which people can be healthy” (Institute of Medicine 1988, p. 1, emphasis added). If we assume that in a functional democracy action by the government is action by us, collectively, then we arrive at yet another way to understand the especially close connection between government action and public health. If one goes further and claims that an action is a public health action only if it is taken by the collective and that an action is performed by us, collectively, only if it is performed by government, then an intervention is a public health intervention only if a government is the relevant actor.