Profits over care? An analysis of the relationship between corporate capitalism in the healthcare industry and cancer mortality in the United States

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4591951
AutoresTam Perry (0000-0002-3893-2001, California State University, San Bernardino, autor de correspondencia), Alexandra Bernasek (0000-0002-7958-7152, California State University, San Bernardino)
Año2024
Volumen349
Páginas116851
Fecha de publicación2024-05-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaSocial Science & Medicine (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0277-9536 • E-ISSN: 1873-5347
EditorialElsevier BV (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.116851
PMID38642520
OpenAlexW4394770276
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas3
Referencias citadas46

The characteristic features of 21st-century corporate capitalism - monopoly and financialization - are increasingly being recognized by public health scholars as undermining the foundations of human health. While the "vectors" through which this is occurring are well known - poverty, inequality, climate change among others - locating the root cause of this process in the nature and institutions of contemporary capitalism is relatively new. Researchers have been somewhat slow to study the relationship between contemporary capitalism and human health. In this paper, we focus on one of the leading causes of death in the United States; cancer, and empirically estimate the relationship between various measures of financialization and monopoly in the US healthcare system and cancer mortality. The measures we focus on are for the hospital industry, the health insurance industry, and the pharmaceutical industry. Using a fixed effects model with different specifications and control variables, our analysis is at the state level for the years 2012-2019. These variables include data on population demographic controls, social and economic factors, and health behavior and clinical care. We compare Medicaid expansion states with non-Medicaid expansion states to investigate variations in state-level funded health insurance coverage. The results show a statistically significant positive correlation between the HHI index in the individual healthcare market and cancer mortality and the opioid dispensing rate and cancer mortality

Capitalism · Economic growth · Economics · Financialization · Health care · Market economy · Medicaid · Monopoly · Political science · Politics · Population · Poverty · Public health · Social determinants of health · Sociology · Demography · Employment and Welfare Studies · Global Health Care Issues · Healthcare cost, quality, practices · Law · Medicine