The Healthcare Factory: Healthcare in the European and Swedish political economies between 1973-2020

Sammanfattning: Healthcare might seem like it is a purely medical issue. Nothing could be further from the truth. Both politics, law and the economy are all closely tied to healthcare. In this thesis I analyze the sensitive topic of healthcare through a critical understanding of the European and Swedish political economies from the 1970s until today. Europe serves as the broad picture, while Swedish healthcare policy and governance help exemplify how abstract ideas of the economy and politics become embedded in our day-to-day actions. Emphasis is put on explaining the policy changes of the Social Democratic Party in Sweden. To my help I use Critical Discourse Analysis on reports, investigations and legal texts, as well as material from interviews with two medical professionals. In addition to this, I triangulate the results by studying second hand material on political and economic conditions in Europe and Sweden. I show how the Social Democrats have introduced New Public Management-reforms as a way to manage the public administration more efficiently. Furthermore, New Public Management-reforms in healthcare are analyzed as an attempt to stabilize a fundamentally unstable transnational political economy by opening a "healthcare market" to attract capital and capitalists.