Paper long abstract:

The global flow of biomedicine is accompanied by an increasing concern of how to finance medical services. To provide health insurance for their citizens African states and other actors are trying to establish Mutual Health Organizations. However, this introduction has temporal dimensions since the idea of insurance is based on certain perceptions about the future and its possibilities for planning and prearranging health and thus preventing crisis.

The importance of health financing, its social meaning and its related practices have been rarely investigated by scholars of medical anthropology. Drawing on fieldwork in Senegal I will take a look into health finance practices as they contrast with a more general idea about social security. Paying for health services is also embedded in a social field of reciprocal obligations and dependencies often within families and larger kinship relations. Emerging biobureaucracies and a variety of factors within wider society create health finance diversities.