Insurance Risks as Ficticious Commodities: When Canadian Private Insurers Face High Cost Specialty Drugs for Rare Diseases

Insurance Risks as Ficticious Commodities: When Canadian Private Insurers Face High Cost Specialty Drugs for Rare Diseases

Categories: Lectures and Seminars | Intended for

Thursday, February 02, 2017

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM | Add to calendar

A715 Loeb Building

1125 Colonel By Dr, Ottawa, ON

Contact Information

Sociology Department, 613-520-2582, soc-anthro@carleton.ca

Registration

No registration required.

Cost

Free

About this Event

Host Organization: Sociology and Anthropology; Emerging Scholars Colloquium
More Information: Please click here for additional details.

This talk presents the central case study of my doctoral dissertation:
the institutional analysis of the responses from Canadian life and health
insurers to the rise of the new “nichebuster” pharmaceutical business
model featuring the arrival of high costs specialty medicines for rare
diseases. I first start by briefly presenting the emerging sociology
of insurance literature before discussing my theoretical framework.
Following economist and historian Karl Polanyi’s institutional analysis,
I developed the theory of the institutional constitution of markets –
defining markets as politically and legally constructed and maintained
institutions – and the concept of insurance risks as fictitious commodities
in order to better understand the functioning of the insurance industry. I
argue that insurance capitalization itself generates instabilities and hence
depends on the fictitious commoditization of substantive uncertainties
into insurance risks by virtue of political-legal and non-competitive
reduction and control of the underlying uncertainties covered as
capital. After a quick discussion of the institutional method and the
challenge of working with data from gray literature, I then present
the analysis of the political-legal interventions and non-competitive
institutional arrangements having recently emerged as responses to the
destabilization of the Canadian prescription drug insurance market due
to the arrival of high cost specialty drugs. Finally, I conclude by outlining
how the study of insurance risks as fictitious commodities can provide a
better understanding of the functioning of other insurance markets.