Camilo Sanz

This book manuscript reveals the relationship between time, cancer care, and social class, following the neoliberal restructuring of the Colombian health care system in 1993. Drawing on 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork with health insurance representatives, oncologists and cancer patients at two hospitals in the city of Cali, my dissertation shows how “Universal” access to medical services in the new liberal era has not countered the socio-economic conditions of patients. On the contrary, when cancer patients are poor and prescribed treatments classified as ‘high cost’, they endure a contradictory temporality between the time needed by the insurance company to get a financial return to its investments, and the time when accessing chemotherapy would be beneficial. Ethnographically tracking this contradictory relationship between the time of cancer medical practices and economic practices, my dissertation discusses the ways in which insurance practices influence a physician’s decision and its consequences.