Constructing a European healthcare market: The private healthcare company Capio and the strategic aspect of the drive for transparency

This article analyses the private healthcare company Capio and its participation in the drive for transparency in the European healthcare field. An important point of departure for the paper is that technologies for transparency, such as accounting and auditing, are not neutral devices for increased openness, but carry with them programmatic dimensions that affect our norms and rules of how healthcare is to be organized and controlled. The drive for transparency engages different actors with various motives. To investigate this we carried out semi-structured interviews with 11 persons, mainly management members of Capio. We show that transparency in healthcare has been put forward by a private actor for strategic reasons. We argue that Capio's involvement in the drive for transparency should be seen as a ‘second-order strategy’ with the aim to create advantageous opportunities in a future European healthcare market. We show that Capio, through its propagation of various transparency technologies, has put forward programmatic ideals of industrialisation, marketisation and Europeanisation in healthcare. The main conclusion is that although Capio has engaged in the drive for transparency for business reasons, the company has also furthered certain political ideals in the field. This study contributes to the literature which problematizes the division between private and public, and between business and politics in healthcare, and is of interest to a broad health policy audience.