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Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the universalizing concept of universal health coverage both in global health discourse and in Senegal to investigate the ideas that travel with global health initiatives and to highlight the contradictions of health solidarities and health privatization at the heart of UHC.

Paper long abstract:

The central goals of this paper are to take up the universalizing concept of universal health coverage (UHC) - its place on the global health agenda and the current push for it in Senegal - as a place to think through the politics of global health, the ideas that travel with global health initiatives, and to piece together a narrative of the contradictions of health solidarity and the privatization of health that exist at the heart of the concept of UHC. "Universal health coverage," as a "social humanitarian," "health economics," and "public health" concept - as Abiiro and De Allegri (2015) have described it - contains hegemonic, as well as alternatives in and to, approaches to global health. Through the example of the mutuelle de santé - or community-based health insurance schemes - and the push for UHC in Senegal, I want to think through the kinds of systems of solidarity that are promoted - and opposed to - through the different assumptions that UHC carries with it. What does it mean that the US - through its bilateral funding agency the US Agency for International Development and its influence on the World Bank - has been a large supporter of community-based health insurance in Senegal, and how is the current roll out of Couverture Maladie Universelle a continuation of the decentralization of health and decentralization of responsibility for the wellbeing of the Senegalese people?