Insurance

Abstract

Carla faced significant challenges with her private health insurer during a medical emergency in Brazil. Her story serves as a lens through which to explore how private insurance practices reflect and shape human experiences of suffering, care, and social responsibility. Her experience is a starting point to shed light on the bureaucratic obstacles and moral dilemmas inherent in private insurance, reinforcing the concept of insurance as a "moralizing technology" that shapes individual responsibilities and risks. I then draw on various scholarly perspectives to critique the historical neglect of insurance in economic anthropology and offer an explanation for that neglect. Studying private insurance contributes to a rethinking of the relationship between solidarity, markets, and suffering. It offers a more nuanced understanding of the connections between solidarity, care, and mechanism of redistribution within capitalist markets.