Emerging Scholars Colloquium – Insurance Risks as Fictitious Commodities: When Canadian Private Insurers Face High event_cost Specialty Drugs for Rare Diseases

• In-person event

Mathieu Charbonneau
Postdoctoral Fellow
Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy

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.