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Cancer Intersections is an ethnographic analysis of the complex and paradoxical efforts to access neoliberal, market-based oncological treatments in Colombia, a country where all patients are legally guaranteed access to medical services, including high-cost oncology treatments. Drawing on years of fieldwork in the city of Cali, Camilo Sanz explores the deep entanglements between medical, legal, and policy practices that share a common goal of treating and curing cancer but are hindered by bureaucratic procedures, pernicious financial interests, and class politics. Cancer Intersections shows how the interplay of these hurdles dictates the rhythm at which patients access treatment and how even in resource-rich settings, patients suffer because of market imperatives that shape how cancer treatments unfold. Through careful and measured ethnography, Sanz unveils how a neoliberal universal health care regime delays access to care for those reliant on public assistance, which means that some patients will start expensive treatments only after they are unlikely to change the course of the disease.
Open Access
Cancer Intersections Biomedicine, Health Insurance, and the Paradoxes of Health Care Reform in Neoliberal Colombia
About the Book
Reviews
"Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why systems meant to save our lives end up killing us instead. Camilo Sanz's heartbreaking account of the harm of profit-driven medicine in Colombia is full of insights for health systems everywhere."—Scott Stonington, author of The Spirit Ambulance: Choreographing the End of Life in Thailand"A richly detailed and theoretically innovative ethnography, Cancer Intersections illuminates how neoliberal health care systems can undermine a legally guaranteed right to health care."—Amy Cooper, author of State of Health: Pleasure and Politics in Venezuelan Health Care under Chávez
"Beautifully narrated, Cancer Intersections shows how universal health insurance in Colombia has exacerbated rather than resolved class-based inequalities in access to health care. While the rich receive a kind of care that is 'in sync' with cancer protocols, the poor waste whatever remaining months or years they have fighting the system's bureaucracy. As untreated or inadequately treated cancers become untreatable, pharmaceutical and insurance companies secure exponential profits and physicians struggle with how to best care for their patients even when it is too late. This book has much to offer to anthropologists, clinicians, bioethicists, philosophers, and policymakers who want to understand how inequities are remade and reframed by market-based health care reforms."—César E. Abadía-Barrero, author of Health in Ruins: The Capitalist Destruction of Medical Care at a Colombian Maternity Hospital
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