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Didier Fassin—

“Didier Fassin is an anthropologist and a sociologist who has conducted fieldwork in Senegal, Ecuador, South Africa, and France. Trained as a physician in internal medicine and public health, he dedicated his early research to medical anthropology, illuminating important dimensions of the AIDS epidemic, mortality disparities, and global health. He later developed the field of critical moral anthropology, which explores the historical, social, and political signification of moral forms involved in everyday judgment and action as well as in the making of international relations with humanitarianism. He recently conducted an ethnography of the state, through a study of urban policing as well as the justice and prison systems in France. His current work is on punishment, asylum, inequality, and the politics of life, and he is developing a reflection on the public presence of the social sciences. He occasionally writes for the French newspapers Le Monde and Libération. His recent books include The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry Into the Condition of Victimhood (2009), Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (2011), Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing (2013), At the Heart of the State: The Moral World of Institutions (2015), and Prison Worlds: An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition (2016).” (https://www.ias.edu/scholars/fassin)

Emergency response is not directly addressed, but the policy of allowing otherwise ineligible people to full access to the emergency medical system indirectly is effected and has its own challenges, disputes, and implications.

The article’s arguments are supported by case studies and statistics.

1) “The logic of state soverignty in the control of migration clearly prevailed over the universality of the principle of the right to life.”

2) “By analogy with the therapeutic mesasures applied at the end of life for patients suffering from illness deemed incurable, we can describe the measures and procedures devised to allow foreign patients without residence rights to stay in France, receive treatment, and have their living costs paid, as a compassion protocol.”

3) “Precisely because he or she is illegally resident, the sick immigrant may undertake medical tests or seek treatment under a different name, so that the cost of treatment is coverd, or simply to avoid being denounced and deported.”

I looked more into the U.S. policy on uninsured patients, ER hospital policy, and how they are treated. If you go the ER without insurance, you are expected to pay the full bill; however you are guaranteed under the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act to receive treatment regardless of your ability to pay it. There are assistance programs available to help those whom cannot afford to pay their medical bills. Some of these are private charities, there are government programs that help with those at or below the poverty line, and the hospitals themselves will often negotiate a much lower price than originally billed for to meet a patient’s financial need. Despite this, there are still many cases where all of the above are not sufficient enough to keep patients out of bankruptcy. (http://health.howstuffworks.com/medicine/go-to-er-without-insurance.htm)

1) Case studies.

2) The laws of France with regard to healthcare and non-citizens.

3)  Personal experience of medical professionals.

There are dense citations throughout the article but no bibliography is included at the end of the chapter so it is not possible to determine.

This article presents an argument for “compassion protocol” by examining what France has done—provide citizenship to immigrants who are not and suffer from a serious medical problem so that they can take advantage of full benefits of the healthcare system. This goes along with the larger theme of the difficulties in placing value on the lives of people who need care and weighing the costs of distributing that precious resource.

This book which the article is from received a positive review from Metapsychology. (http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=6430)

Another well recived review was done by Dr. Duncan Wilson on the Centre for Medical Humanities website. (http://centreformedicalhumanities.org/humanitarian-reason-a-moral-history-of-the-present-reviewed-by-dr-duncan-wilson/)