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"The King is Ours Too": Moroccan Public Hospital Administrators Face the Test of RAMED
Abstract
In 2013, the Kingdom of Morocco generalised a system of free access to healthcare for the most disadvantaged populations: the Ramed. This targeted social policy has consequences for hospital management: on the one hand, by contributing to reconfiguring the work of administrators and agents at hospital admissions and consultations desks, and on the other hand, by making the care process even more complicated for beneficiaries. Faced with an influx of patients who are often uninformed about the procedure, the officials in charge of implementation find themselves dealing with situations that are unprecedented for them and having to interact with private security guards responsible for directing and sometimes filtering the public. Based on interviews with administrators and counter staff as well as observations in waiting rooms and reception areas, this paper will discuss the realities and ambivalences of what is commonly referred to as the discretionary power of state agents. It will also highlight the implicit and explicit social categorisation work that state officials engage in in their day-to-day interactions with a plurality of actors, from claimants to intermediaries to their non-state colleagues. In fact, civil servants and hospital administrators are at the interface of several categories of public and partners with whom they also have to negotiate and sometimes impose. Finally, it will look at the ordinary perceptions and judgements that civil servants have of their work and their position within the State. In this respect, these perceptions benefit from being examined from the angle of the moral economy or, to put it another way, as expressions of feelings of justice or ordinary injustice towards their employer, the State, which does not spare them any more than they themselves are able to spare the public of public action.
Discipline
Political Science
Geographic Area
Morocco
Sub Area
None