Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Springer

Review of Evolutionary Political Economy - Call for Papers - Special Issue: "Health Capitalism and Financialization of Healthcare"

Guest Editors:


The Covid-19 pandemic was an occasion to observe the importance of health, public health and health care for our economies and societies. It also demonstrated that health has been transformed into a site of profit extraction (Moscario et al., 2022). For instance, while the pharmaceutical industry is emblematic of how innovation and drug production saved lives and enabled a return to pre-pandemic living, the development and marketing of medication is significantly profit-driven (Guennif, 2022). The scandal of OxyContin in the USA demonstrates the power of commercial interest over public health (Van Zee, 2009). More broadly, other examples include for-profit hospitals, private medical laboratories, private health insurance, global health programs (Erikson, 2015) or health industries and digitalization (eHealth, mHealth) (Al Dahdah, 2023).

Welfare states organize the links between capitalism and health and partially prevent the extension of capitalism in this sector. Yet, the values underpinning market fundamentalism permeate welfare states. Therefore, an analysis of the processes through which the infusion of market-oriented values shapes the increasing commodification of health is a relevant task (André et al., 2016; Ehrenstein, 2023; Maarse, 2006).

Particular attention has been paid to the process of financialization to designate the way in which financial actors have become key players in the financing of health care, for example by becoming owners of the organizations producing health care, and accordingly claimants to ‘surpluses’ produced (Cordilha, 2021; Jansen Feirrera, 2022; Hunter and Murray, 2019; Montalban and Sakinç, 2013; Vural, 2017; Sharon, 2018). The process of financialization is frequently accompanied by the “industrialization of care” as caring activities are time constrained and narrowed in scope (Da Silva, 2023; Davis and McMaster, 2017) and the concentration is leading to the constitution of hegemonic groups (Angeli and Maarse, 2012). Far from being an obstacle to capitalism in the field of health, the welfare state is at the heart of its development. It builds markets, it distributes rents, it secures profits through generous social funding. The growing compliance of public health policies to the interests of capitalism seems to be a parallel movement to the retreat of democracy (Vahabi and al., 2020).

The purpose of this special issue of the Review of Evolutionary Political Economy is to further develop the discussion on health capitalism and the advance of the financial sector in health activities. As research on financialization is pluralistic in nature (Stockhammer et al., 2021), we welcome papers from a variety of disciplines (comparative and international political economy, economic sociology, …), based on diverse approaches (theoretical, empirical) and methods (case-studies, statistics, archival work, modeling, …) reflecting of health capitalism and highlighting and clarifying the process of financialization in healthcare and addressing the following possible research questions:

Health capitalism

  • What is health capitalism? Would it be more appropriate to speak of healthcare capitalisms? How has capitalism introduced the importance of health into its business model? How can capitalism carry the aspiration to be healthy?
  • Is there a variety (in time and space) of health and healthcare capitalisms?  How does the financialization of healthcare affect the varieties of health capitalisms?
  • What are the special tools of the political economy of health and healthcare to analyze heath capitalism?  How can the evolution of competition between for-profit, non-profit, public actors be analyzed?


Financialization of Healthcare

  • By what means and why has financial capital penetrated the health sector? What are the economic dynamics that have fostered this phenomenon? 
  • How is healthcare financialization different from the usual processes of financialization?
  • Does the Covid-19 pandemic represent a 'healthcare financialization moment'? 
  • What role does the digitalization in the healthcare sector play in the financialization processes?


Public policies

  • Which public policies have favored these developments and why?
  • What is the specific role of the state (and welfare state) in health capitalism and the financialization of healthcare? How does the entrepreneurial state interact with the welfare state when health issues are concerned?
  • How does health financialization corrupt the (national and global) health public policies and the way health issues are dealt? How do corporate and financial interests influence governments on those issues? Does health capitalism predate the welfare states?


Consequences of health capitalism and financialization of healthcare

  • How does health capitalism shape the medical professions? 
  • What are the effects of the financialization of health on care? Does the provision of care become a market relationship? If so, does this diminish care?
  • What are the effects of the financialization of health on inequalities and the access to healthcare?
  • Does health capitalism impact on key health variables, such as stalled life expectancy observed in many parts of the Global North?
  • How does a finance-led provision of care produce public sector healthcare fallibility and bankruptcies?


Timeline

30th September 2023: Submission of title and abstracts (please send abstract to: philippe.batifoulier@univ-paris13.fr (this opens in a new tab))

30th November 2023: Notification of acceptance by Guest editors

30th March 2024: Invited papers must be submitted via REPE’s online submission system for peer review

15th December 2024: End of review process (after possibly two rounds)

30th January 2025: Final version of the paper should be submitted

2025: Publication of the SI   


REPE supports ‘online first publishing’. Papers will be published online upon acceptance after having been peer-reviewed by 2-3 independent reviewers, which may be earlier than the publication date of the full issue.

All selected contributions will go through a full peer review process according to the usual standards of REPE.


References

Al Dahdah, M. (2023). “Top up your healthcare access”: mobile money to finance healthcare in sub-Saharan Africa. In: Chiapello, È., Engels, A. and Gresse, E. (eds). Financializations of development. Routledge, London.

André, C., Batifoulier, P. and Jansen-Ferreira, M. (2016). Health care privatization processes in Europe: Theoretical justifications and empirical classification. International Social Security Review, 69(1), 3-23.

Angeli, F. and Maarse, H. (2012). Mergers and Acquisitions in Western European Health Care. Health Policy, 105, 265-272,

Cordilha, A. C. (2021). Public health systems in the age of financialization: lessons from the French case, Review of social Economy, 2, 246-273.

Da Silva, N. (2023). The Industrialization of Healthcare and Its Critiques. In: Diaz-Bone, R. and de Larquier, G. (eds). Handbook of Economics and Sociology of Conventions. Springer, Cham.

Davis, J. B. and McMaster, R. (2017). Health Care Economics, Routledge, London

Ehrenstein, V. (2023). Financial circuits of vaccine procurement in the era of global health. In: Chiapello, È., Engels, A. and Gresse, E. (eds). Financializations of development. Routledge, London.

Erikson, S. L. (2015). Secrets from Whom? Following the Money in Global Health Finance.  Current Anthropology, 56(12), S306-S316.

Guennif, S. (2022). Capture and passive predation in times of COVID-19 pandemic. Public Choice, 193, 163-186.

Hunter, B. M. and Murray, S. F. (2019). Deconstructing the financialization of healthcare. Development and Change, 50(5), 1263-1287.

Jansen-Ferreira, M. (2022), Health financialization in Brazil: some evidence in the hospital sector. Économie et Institutions, 30-31.

Maarse, H. (2006). The Privatization of Health Care in Europe. Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, 31(5), 981-1014.

Montalban, M. and Sakinç, E. (2013). Financialization and productive models in pharmaceutical industry’. Industrial and Corporate Change, 22(4), 981-1030.

Mosciaro, M., Kaika, M. and Engelen, E. (2022). Financializing Healthcare and Infrastructures of Social Reproduction: How to Bankrupt a Hospital and be Unprepared for a Pandemic. Journal of Social Policy, 1-19.

Roy, V. (2017). The Financialization of a Cure: A Political Economy of Biomedical Innovation, Pricing, and Public Health. University of Cambridge.

Sharon, T. (2018). When digital health meets digital capitalism, how many common goods are at stake? Big Data and Society, 5(2), 1-12.

Stockhammer, E., Sgambati, S. and Nesvetailova, A. (2021). Financialisation: continuity and change— introduction to the special issue. Review of Evolutionary Political Economy, 2(3), 389-401.

Vahabi, M., Batifoulier, P. and Da Silva, N. (2020). A theory of predatory welfare state and citizen welfare: the French case. Public Choice, 182, 243–271.

Van Zee, A. (2009). The promotion and marketing of OxyContin: Commercial triump, public health tragedy. American Journal of Public Health, 99(2), 221-7

Vural, I. (2017). Financialisation in health care: An analysis of private equity fund investments in Turkey. Social Science & Medicine, 187, 276 -286.


Download this Call for Papers here (this opens in a new tab).

Search

Navigation