Short Abstract

This panel will assemble research on the causes, forms and consequences of health-related debts, aiming to understand the connections between changes in the politics and financing of healthcare, different manifestations of health indebtedness, and effects on patients, families and societies.

Description

Where health is funded privately, payments for healthcare easily lead to personal indebtedness. Health debts are a phenomenon that is well-researched for the USA and some other higher-income countries. The majority world largely remains terra incognita, yet qualitative evidence (e.g. from financial inclusion research) suggests health expenses are crucial to why many people become entrapped in debt. Meanwhile, recent scholarship notes “structural changes that are turning healthcare into a playing field for capitalist actors” (Batifoulier et al. 2025), which suggests systemic links between financialisation, profit-making, rising health expenses, and indebtedness. This panel aims to crack open the black box regarding health-related indebtedness in the majority world by assembling contributions that study its causes, manifestations, and consequences, and ideally the links between these. For example, when publicly funded healthcare erodes and new for-profit providers, blended finance arrangements, or outsourcing models enter – and introduce or exacerbate value extraction logics – how does this affect patients and their families? In what forms does health-related indebtedness manifest – such as different burdens of debt, treatment inequalities, or even hospital incarceration as debt prisoners – and how do people cope? In turn, health-related indebtedness may have consequences such as delayed treatment-seeking, worsened gender inequalities, heightened familial or community strife, descent into debt traps, and even lethal outcomes, as well as political and systemic-level repercussions. To tackle these complex, multi-layered and often hidden issues, our panel is explicitly exploratory and welcomes contributions from any disciplinary perspective, especially contributions that are strongly empirically grounded.

This Panel has 3 pending paper proposals.
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