Repoliticising national policy mobilities: Resisting the Americanization of universal healthcare

Abstract

Policy mobilities scholarship has comprehensively challenged the methodological nationalism and rational orthodoxies of policy studies. Contributing to recent debates on policy mobilities and post-politics, this paper examines how struggles over the ‘national’ shape policy on the move. Focussing on attempts to embed accountable care models across the English National Health Service (NHS), I consider how ‘integration’ has been mobilised as a seemingly irresistible solution to the failures of market-orientated healthcare reforms in times of austerity. Yet, I foreground how campaigners slowed down the local contracting of accountable care through repoliticising circulating policy as the ‘Americanization’ of the NHS. The paper emphasises the ongoing, yet shifting and politically contested, role of the state and national spatial imaginaries in the making and translating of globally mobile policy. Rethinking the times and spaces of politics and policy in the current conjuncture, I conclude by warning of the limits of nostalgia for the post-war national welfare state when pushing for universal healthcare as a right for all.