Critical Anthropology of Global Health “Takes a Stand” Statement: A Critical Medical Anthropological Approach to the U.S.'s Affordable Care Act

Abstract

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010--the U.S.'s first major health care reform in over half a century-has sparked new debates in the United States about individual responsibility, the collective good, and the social contract. Although the ACA aims to reduce the number of the uninsured through the simultaneous expansion of the private insurance industry and government-funded Medicaid, critics charge it merely expands rather than reforms the existing fragmented and costly employer-based health care system. Focusing in particular on the ACA's individual mandate and its planned Medicaid expansion, this statement charts a course for ethnographic contributions to the on-the-ground impact of the ACA while showcasing ways critical medical anthropologists can join the debate. We conclude with ways that anthropologists may use critiques of the ACA as a platform from which to denaturalize assumptions of "cost" and "profit" that underpin the global spread of market-based medicine more broadly.

Health insurance in India: what do we know and why is ethnographic research needed

“…Health insurance as one such technology and also an intervention is yet to be addressed properly through ethnography everywhere. In the United States of America (USA), anthropologists have only recently been called upon to pay attention to this topic, as health reform has become a pressing political issue (Horton et al 2014). A similar appeal has been made for anthropologists working in low-and middle-income countries such as Vietnam and Thailand where the idea of UHC has been pushed for by international bodies such as the World Health Organization (Dao and Nichter 2015).…”

Toward an Anthropology of Insurance and Health Reform: An Introduction to the Special Issue

“…Toward this end, we undertook a variety of activities: compiling a bibliography to serve as a collective resource for medical anthropologists, organizing a panel at the 2011 annual meeting for the American Anthropological Association in Montreal, assembling mini‐statements on various aspects of health insurance reform, and creating a position paper taking a stand on the issue . The articles collected here, together with a previously published piece by Horton and colleagues (), represent the culmination of our efforts to explore how medical anthropologists might critically engage in the study of insurance and expand our ethnographic understanding of health reform.…”

The Erosion of Rights to Abortion Care in the United States: A Call for a Renewed Anthropological Engagement with the Politics of Abortion

“…Similarly, as we track the unfolding of health insurance reform through the Affordable Care Act (Dao and Mulligan ; Horton et al. ), we need to examine the gendered consequences of provisions that continue to require the separation of abortion care from other reproductive care services to avoid the use of tax‐payer dollars to cover abortion.…”