Great questions! Please follow up during the interviews. I am also curious about your experiences of traveling to Naluwan via various transportation methods. Are there different senses of place when you travel by car, by train, by foot?
“Under a 1986 federal law titled the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), hospitals are required to treat people who come to the ED presenting with an emergency medical condition, defined as a condition that, without treatment, will likely lead to serious impairment or death. … EMTALA is one of the largest federal mandates to provide services to have gone unfunded (Friedman 2011); costs instead fall on states and local health care systems.” 481
“In bringing ethnographic attention to hot spotting as a technique of governance, we find that it provides lifesaving humanitarian interventions while operating within the racialized structures of violence that produce continual life crises. The institutional rationality of hotspotting and the encounters of care that it produces illustrate the often-contradictory role of medicine in the lives of poor people: both caring and coercive, it intertwines care and violence.” 475; “we conclude by suggesting that economic investment and return are becoming a reigning logic in the governance of poverty, generating hot spots as sites of interest for both policing and health care and decentering normative assessments of deviance, illness, and social problems” 476; “Neoliberal social assistance, as it is practiced in the health care safety net, is conceptualized as an “investment “in the population, as a strategic and targeted deployment of basic resources, one that promises to generate a return on investment for the state or health system in the form of cost savings.“ 485
The authors examine the practice of “hot spotting,” a form of surveillance and intervention through which health care systems in the US intensively direct health and social services towards high-cost patients. Health care hot spotting is seen as a way to improve population health while also reducing financial expenditures on healthcare for impoverished people. The authors argue that argue that ultimately hot spotting targets zones of racialized urban poverty—the same neighborhoods and individuals that have long been targeted by the police. These practices produce “a convergence of caring and punitive strategies of governance” (474). The boundaries between the spaces of healthcare and policing have shifted as a “financialized logic of governance has come to dominate both health and criminal justice” (474).
"Instead of treating data as independent sources, we should be asking, Where do data direct us, and who might help us understand their origins as well as their sites of potential impact? The implications of these questions are threefold. For practitioners who want to work with data, understanding local conditions can dispel the dangerous illusion that any data offer what science and technology studies scholar Donna Haraway calls “the view from nowhere.”For students and scholars, attention to the local offers an opportunity to compare diverse cultures through the data that they make or use. Finally, local perspectives on data can awaken new forms of social advocacy. For wherever data are used, local communities of producers, users, and even nonusers are affected." (p. 3)