Cancer Intersections

"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