The assetization of care? A comparative exploration of investor logic in healthcare systems in England, Canada, and the Netherlands

This paper examines how financial actors enter and reshape healthcare systems, building new, often transnational, social, technical, and financial infrastructures for organising and providing care. We use the concept of assetization - the transformation of 'things' into rent-generating assets for investors - to explore how financial actors appear within healthcare. Drawing on empirical case studies from England, Canada, and the Netherlands, we show how assetization unfolds differently across national contexts, shaped by political cultures, regulatory environments, and institutional legacies. Rather than deploying uniform strategies, financial actors respond strategically to systemic frictions and perceived crises, positioning themselves as problem-solvers and embedding investor logic into healthcare provision. As such, assetization is an active process that constructs new infrastructures facilitating future investment and normalising financial presence in healthcare. By tracing how an emerging investor logic reshapes the conditions that allow financial actors to turn healthcare into an asset across different socio-political and institutional contexts, and by tracing the mechanisms through which this logic is articulated and enacted, this paper reveals how care is increasingly integrated into broader circuits of financialization.