The Factory Available to Purchase

Chapter 2 examines the meeting of industrial mores and medical values that took place at the Henry Ford Hospital. The chapter examines the portrayal of the Ford Hospital by critics and supporters alike as the application of Ford’s industrial processes directly to health care, separating out what was distinctively Fordist and what was characteristic of the larger medical efficiency movement. The chapter focuses on a critical distinctive piece that made the hospital Ford’s: its insistence on a flat, set rate for all services. This flat rate facilitates comparison between Ford’s industrial and medical efficiency settings, which, in turn, allows a fuller and more holistic picture of Fordism to emerge. Thus, the chapter considers the critical intersection of social welfare and industrial capitalism at work at Ford and opens up essential questions about efficiency’s incongruous commitments to populism, egalitarianism, and democracy and simultaneously to autocracy, atomization and nativism.