Skip to main content
Article
Critical Anthropology of Global Health 'Takes a Stand' Statement: A Critical Medical Anthropological Approach to the US' Affordable Care Act
Medical Anthropology Quarterly (2014)
  • Sarah Horton
  • Cesar Abadía
  • Jessica Mulligan, Providence College
  • Jennifer Jo Thompson
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.
Publication Date
March, 2014
Citation Information
Sarah Horton, Cesar Abadía, Jessica Mulligan and Jennifer Jo Thompson. "Critical Anthropology of Global Health 'Takes a Stand' Statement: A Critical Medical Anthropological Approach to the US' Affordable Care Act" Medical Anthropology Quarterly Vol. 28 Iss. 1 (2014)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/jessica_mulligan/2/