Corporatization of Health Care: A Quiet Linguistic Strategy

As an anti-capitalist, I am rightly sickened by Western medicine’s move from the terminology of “patient” centered care to “client” centered care. The concepts are both the same; care individually tailored to the patient/client’s needs. However, this is where semantics hold much weight. The change in terminology brings an array of ideals and connotations, and a support of the hegemonic power structure of capitalism, where the use of the word “client” reduces human beings to a means of gaining profit.

A client is a customer; someone who pays for goods or services. A patient is person who requires medical care. Persons, who require medical care, need medical care to prevent morbidity and mortality, regardless of their financial ability. A client can pay for the “goods or services” (health care), regardless if they actually need it to prevent morbidity and mortality. The use of “client” slyly inserts the importance of the monetary exchange between the health care seeker and the health care giver. “Patient” is a much too nebulous term to continue to use in Western medicine’s movement towards full corporatization of Western health care.

This movement is taking place quietly, creeping into our future health care professionals’ classrooms, in the hospitals we treat people, and most unfortunately, in the way some of us view health care as a privilege and not a right. It is through insipid inconspicuous tactics, like changing terminology, we are unwittingly influenced. Health care textbooks have been updated with newer editions that have been careful to use “client” instead of the outdated “patient”. As health care professionals, we begin to call the health care seekers our “clients”. We internalize that health care is only for those that can pay. The vows we took to do no harm and to help others have been discreetly replaced with the values of money and fiscal integrity. Before we know it, we believe that health care is a privilege for only those that can pay. We begin to attach human worth to economic value. In the end, it is those that cannot pay that need our help most of all.

This subtle linguistic change is a way to transform our thinking. We must be cognizant of the influence capitalism has on our health, our way of life, and our way of thinking. Remember: just because an idea is the most predominant and popular does not mean this idea is just. Human worth should never be reduced to monetary value. Commodity fetishism in the relations between the sick and the healers is offensive. Ultimately, the sick are objectified. The actual humanness of the patient in question are replaced with diagnoses, ICD-9 codes, and health insurance policies. The relations between human beings are transformed into economic exchanges.

This is not a world we want to live in.

Disconnect between humans, reduction of human beings into profit generators, and the demise of health care professionals into soulless money making profiteers are what we should fight against. We cannot let corporatization control how we practice medicine and how we care about our patients.