Transnational Health: Coordinating Care Across International Borders

• In Event: International Cooperation on Migration

Abstract

This paper explores efforts to increase access to health care via international cooperation. Social protection is generally seen as the province of the state; subsequently when individuals move across international borders, they may also in turn lose access to health care. Conversely, as health care is increasingly privatized and out of reach for citizens in immigrant-receiving countries, going abroad for services or relying ever-increasingly on foreign labor is seen as a necessary step to maintain coverage.

How and when can international cooperation maintain or even extend access to health care for citizens and non-citizens alike? By taking a transnational lens to what is often seen as a national issue, and looking at both sending and receiving countries, we identify emerging institutions of social protection that move beyond the nation state or the state-market dichotomy. However, these institutions may carry serious implications for states. In migrant-receiving states, the combined effect of aging populations, budget cuts, and privatization of care has increased reliance on foreign workers at the same time as rising nativist populism threatens to shut off the pipeline of foreign care workers. On the other side, governments of migrant-sending states increasingly find themselves squeezed between the demands (and economic importance) of their remittance-sending expat populations, and the political and economic demands of citizens at home. How states balance the benefits of international cooperation with domestic political concerns then is critical to the future of health care.

Author

• Erica Dobbs, Pomona College