4 ideas
Instead he is drawn into an endless cycle of tests, fees, queues and contradictory instructions, and is never given a clear diagnosis. He finds he cannot leave, and he gradually learns that the hospital's reach extends over the whole city and beyond, so that there is no outside to return to.
When the hospital becomes the organizing institution of society, being sick stops being a temporary deviation and becomes the default status through which a person exists socially. Identity, rights and belonging are routed through a patient file. Recovery becomes structurally impossible because a cured person would have no place in the system.
Denying patients clear information about what is wrong with them makes them dependent. Someone who cannot name their condition cannot judge whether a treatment is working, cannot refuse it, and cannot leave. So they keep submitting to more tests and payments in hope of eventually learning the truth, and uncertainty becomes a tool of control rather than a gap in knowledge.
Read any caregiving system by asking where money, bodies and labor flow, not what its mission statement says. A hospital that profits from treatment has an incentive to find illness everywhere and to prolong it. Patients then function as raw material the institution consumes to sustain itself.