Consumerism has been given a boost with the advancement in technology, industries, and capitalism. It is this ideology that has percolated in every aspect of our life, encouraging happiness and contentment from increased consumption.

 The healthcare industry had a gross national income of $110 billion in 2016 and is expected to reach $372 billion by 2022. (IBEF, 2019) The reasons for this boost could be several like an increase in the supply of goods or advancement in the availability of raw materials and information, but that’s a topic for another day. 

Let’s have a look at how consumerism is affecting the healthcare industry and its patients. 

The hospitals and healthcare providers are becoming more and more consumer-oriented, investing massive amounts of money in bettering ‘people’, ‘systems’, and ‘processes’ in order to appeal to the consumer. They employ different strategies, invest in updated technology, and cater to different preferences of people. 

The canteens are spotlessly clean, the patient rooms have T.V, the visitors get free checkups, the extra staff is employed to improve patient interaction and facilitate the process of availing loans/ insurances.  

A lot more of these comfort facilities are can be bought at the hospitals at a certain price. Increasingly, patients are perceived  as ‘consumers’ rather than ‘patients’ seeking support for their ailing condition. They are presented with a menu of surgeries having a range of prices, depending on the facilities, surgeons, and the technology you choose. 

 These healthcare systems subject individuals to multiple contact points and confusing decisions lacking clarity in terms of service they provide and value they charge. For many lower and middle-class families, this process of visiting a hospital and seeking treatment has become so daunting that they would decline treatment simply to avoid confusion and expense. 

Government Hospitals are not an option for most people since they lack proper facilities and infrastructure to ensure a healthy recovery. They are the last resorts for people who absolutely cannot afford a private hospital. 

Private practitioners have flourished by keeping in trend and updating themselves with the competitive market. Apart from offering basic quality treatments, they increasingly strive to cater to this group of people who have resorted to be ‘holistically’ cared for by an efficient healthcare system and generally do not engage in taking efforts for managing their own health information. 

The free choice for these people is curbed due to lack required resources like time or knowledge to influence the choices they are provided with. These patients report facing a crisis in making a balanced decision between price and quality of the service, and are usually drilled with the belief that ‘I can’t help it, what must be done, must be done’.  

The healthcare providers don’t offer these consumers much role, they have little say in the treatments and very little scope of paying attention to the costs.

There are also a certain group of people who are interested and active consumers of the healthcare industry. They are the ones who’d seek information about their bodies, any abnormalities they face, or about any illness their loved ones happen to catch. 

They seek information from google, friends or relatives and act to their capacity in finding different solutions for the same. But even with the information, there are increased chances of misinterpretation due to a lack of specialized knowledge. 

However, consumerism isn’t excessively a negative thing, it has created huge employment opportunities for a lot of people, and encourages transparency in practice.  What we could strive for is a more ‘value’ based system from which the patient gets adequate treatment and is not treated like a mindless scapegoat that bleeds money.