Traditional welfare state systems in Scandinavia are challenged by new governance systems. Demands for efficiency and productivity in healthcare increase, raising questions about patients' positions and agency. This also implies ethical dilemmas for healthcare professionals. Comprehensively analysing the findings of previous discourse studies on how the patient is constructed in central policy texts, this study compares the position of the patient and the accompanying ideological struggles in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. The purpose was to compare and discuss the findings of discursive constructions of patients in law and policy text from the three countries. We found an ideological struggle across the Scandinavian countries, operating at a political level, a legislative level and a healthcare level, with variation in how the new value-based patient care is constructed. We conclude that national governance systems still exert hegemonic power by strongly influencing patients' degree of choice and autonomy. The Scandinavian countries may all be heading towards a commercial healthcare market, despite their tradition of a welfare model of healthcare. Today, healthcare strategies move in the opposite direction, controlled by politicians' financial goals. The ideological struggle between welfare state governance and other governance systems, may exist also in other western countries in our globalized world.