Financializing Healthcare and Infrastructures of Social Reproduction: How to Bankrupt a Hospital and be Unprepared for a Pandemic (original) (raw)

2022, Mosciaro, M., Kaika, M., & 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. doi:10.1017/S004727942200023X

https://doi.org/10.1017/S004727942200023X

The paper extends the empirical and conceptual scope of Social Reproduction Theory by bringing it into dialogue with debates on financialization. We call for the need to document and theorize the “lived” dimension of the financialization and marketization of social reproduction infrastructures, and of healthcare in particular. Our argument draws empirically on the analysis of patient and staff safety and vulnerability issues related to the bankruptcy of the Slotervaart hospital in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The case of Slotervaart’s bankruptcy that we analyze here is not only a story about financialization, marketization, and commodification of healthcare; it is also (and we argue, more importantly so) a story about the financialization of everyday life of doctors, nurses and patients, and about the broader results of the delegation of near-absolute power to finance-led institutions over key social reproduction infrastructures. Our analysis aims to put the management of infrastructures of social reproduction to the core of academic and policy debate; an act that the COVID-19 pandemic has made imperative.