ABSTRACT
In the market patients are called customers. In state politics we are addressed as citizens. Like customers, citizens makes their own choices, but otherwise the two variants of the logic of choice are very different. While customers buy products on a market, citizens are first and foremost defined in relation to the state. In liberal democracies citizens are supposed to carry the state and to govern themselves collectively. In practice we usually do this by voting once in a while, leaving our representatives to do the actual daily governing for us. But citizenship is not just a matter of regulating the affairs of the state, it also impresses a specific shape on the relations between people. Civic laws frame the relations between people, whom they call citizens, as contracts. Contracts come with rights and duties that the parties involved are supposed to respect. Over the past few decades most Western countries have implemented ‘patient laws’: laws that configure patients and health-care professionals as citizens in relation to each other. According to these laws, a patient who enters a consulting room implicitly signs a contract with the professional he finds there. And by agreeing to help the patient, the professional is implicated in this contractual agreement too.1
