UC Berkeley

While hospital care has become more market-driven over the last thirty years, the commodification of hospital care remains uneven and incomplete. There are three persistent problems with the commodification of hospital care: our understanding of hospital care as a right; our understanding of hospital care as connected to moral values and emotional commitments; and our uncertainty about the value of care. Using participant observation and in-depth interviews across three not-for-profit hospitals in the same California city, I demonstrate how the commodification of hospital care is contested but done so differently, and with different effects, in different organizational contexts.