Unequal Coverage

Heide Castañeda (Author) Heide Castañeda is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of South Florida. She is the author of Unequal Coverage: The Experience of Health Care Reform in the US (NYU Press, 2017).Jessica M. Mulligan (Editor) Jessica Mulligan is Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management at Providence College. Her current research explores insurance, financial security, and health reform from the perspective of the newly insured and those who continue to lack coverage. She is the author of Unmanageable Care: An Ethnography of Health Care Privatization in Puerto Rico (NYU Press, 2014), as well as multiple journal articles.

"Unequal Coverage,edited by Mulligan and Castan~eda, is an excellent group of ethnographic studies describing the lived experiences of unfair health insurance in the United States. It is must-reading for anyone interested in understanding the Affordable Care Act and how it has impacted the population and health care providers." (Choice) "Unequal Coverage will be of interest to medical anthropologists and sociologists, as well as their students, as it is a book that captures the lived experience of health reform. But this book should not be missed by those of us who are students of policy and politics, as it is a fascinating study in implementation. It captures the many layers of unintended consequences that invariably flow from incremental policy strategies designed to shore up gaps in insurance coverage within complex, market-based health care systems. Readers will come away appreciating that the unintended consequences of the ACA have been far-reaching, extending well beyond the health care system." - Medical Anthropology Quarterly "This insightful and timely volume foregrounds individuals lived experiences of health reformwhether they were included in the reform or excluded. By attending to the nuances of political subjectivities, the complexity of regional variation, and the messiness of the laws implementation on the ground, the contributors help illuminate how a middle-of-road reform became one of the most politically contentious issues of our time." - Sarah Horton, author ,They Leave Their Kidneys in the Fields: Illness, Injury, and "Illegality" among U.S. Farmworkers ""If there was ever a time to shed light on the policies fostering health care inequality in the United States, that time is now. The contributors to this volume invite us to consider how healthcare reform creates often contradictory inclusions and exclusions for different populations across the country, and documents the real-world impacts of policies that foster stratification and specific notions of risk and responsibility. This book will appeal to health policy students and scholars, but is also an engaging ethnographic work accessible to any reader interested in understanding the inequalities created by the U.S. healthcare system."" - Mark Nichter,Regents Professor of Anthropology, Public Health and Family Medicine University of Arizona "Unequal Coverage presents telling ethnographic studies of how the Affordable Care Act is explained in the distinctive local moral worlds that constitute inequality in America. It is the most important effort by anthropologists that I have come across to describe the lived experience of inequality in health insurance. Timely and salient!" - Arthur Kleinman, MD,Professor of Anthropology and Psychiatry, Harvard University