I walked to office six days post-COVID-19 to test my bodily strength: Hyper-ableism brought on by the Swiss insurance state

This paper examines the claim that the Swiss state is an ‘insurance’ state. The terminology 'insurance state' is an allegory of the term ‘surveillance state’. We wish to posit that healthcare, ownership and material and service insurances (travel, theft, damage, electronic, home) produce neoliberal anxieties owing to the privatization of social risk (Ludwig, 2016). This privatization further produces subjects which involve themselves in self-fashioning (Ong, 2006) modes of governance that obscure, tolerate and neglect healthcare at the risk of hyper-ableist discourses (Fore, 2021) of "I do not fall sick because I cycle to work everyday" or such as the title of this paper "I walked to office six days post COVID to test my body’s strength". Such ableist accounts of life have become the "Swiss" way of life – where citizens assume that they are well and postpone healthcare and diagnostics, instead replacing them with selffashioning ways of dealing with illness (physical or mental, chronic or acute). We undertook a media analysis of newspaper coverage from three major national dailies that have English translations available – 20min.ch, NZZ.ch and letemps.ch. We identified at reportage that comments specifically on the unavailability of doctors or timely appointments as well as reportage that describes insurance prices rise and its reasons. We combine these with autoethnographic vignettes from our own experiences with healthcare as well as observations of interview participants who have recently fallen ill and sought healthcare on a long-term or sustained basis, within the Swiss insurance system. In our findings we present the pervasiveness and growing neoliberal policies of the Swiss government and the insurance industry – whereby every market fluctuation is followed by insurance price inflation and hyper-ableism is encouraged in the citizenry.