Speculating on health

Public Health Meets Finance in 'Health Impact Bonds

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2249152
AutoresRachel Rowe (0000-0003-2994-3240, School of Public Health and Community Medicine The University of New South Wales Australia), Niamh Stephenson (0000-0001-8105-1931, School of Public Health and Community Medicine The University of New South Wales Australia)
Año2016
Volumen38
Número8
Páginas1203-1216
Fecha de publicación2016-11-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaSociology of Health & Illness (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0141-9889 • E-ISSN: 1467-9566
EditorialWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/1467-9566.12450
PMID27426224
OpenAlexW2495150617
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas6
Referencias citadas33

Where modern public health developed techniques to calculate probability, potentiality, risk and uncertainty, contemporary finance introduces instruments that redeploy these. This article traces possibilities for interrogating the connection between health and financialisation as it is arising in one particular example - the health impact bond. It locates the development of this very recent financial innovation in an account of public health's role within governance strategies over the 20th century to the present. We examine how social impact bonds for chronic disease prevention programmes bring two previously distinct ways of thinking about and addressing risk into the same domain. Exploring the derivative-type properties of health impact bonds elucidates the financial processes of exchange, hedging, bundling and leveraging. As tools for speculation, the functions of health impact bonds can be delinked from any particular outcome for participants in health interventions. How public health techniques for knowing and acting on risks to population health will contest, rework or be subsumed within finance's speculative response to risk, is to be seen

Actuarial science · Bond · Business · CONTEST · Corporate governance · Economics · Environmental health · Futures contract · Political science · Population · Population health · Public economics · Public health · Speculation · Community Development and Social Impact · Finance · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Medicine · Mental Health and Patient Involvement