Shifting solidarities: Personalisation in insurance and medicine

Abstract

Medicine and healthcare have been affected by the pervasive ideal of personalisation based on behavioural, genomic and other data. Visions of personalised and precision medicine bear the promise of making healthcare cheaper and more effective. At the same time, social science scholarship has criticised these trends for increasing the risk of discrimination, and warned of a decline of solidarity. We analyse two practices, namely personalisation in insurance and in medicine, to illustrate the workings and effects of data-driven personalisation for the (un-)shaping of solidarity. We discuss how relationships between processes and phenomena that are often presented as oppositional, namely singularisation v. generalisation, the individual v. the population, and self-interested v. other-directed practices, play-off and align in surprising ways. They also open opportunities for new forms of solidarity in Europe.