Platform capitalism and the erosion of public care: digital home-visit elderly care in South Korea

Digital platforms are rapidly entering publicly financed care systems, yet how they reshape the public character of welfare services remains poorly understood. This study examines digital home-visit care platforms (DHVCPs) in South Korea, where universal Long-Term Care Insurance provides public financing but service delivery operates through a highly fragmented market of small private agencies. Drawing on Bozeman’s publicness framework, we analyse how platform-mediated care affects both dimensional publicness – the degree of governmental authority over service provision – and normative publicness — organizational commitment to values such as equity, transparency, and relational continuity. Using mixed methods combining venture capital investment analysis with semi-structured stakeholder interviews, we identify three reinforcing mechanisms through which platformisation erodes publicness: algorithmic opacity that severs accountability linkages; financialised growth imperatives that subordinate care quality to investor-driven scaling; and regulatory misalignment that enables platforms to exploit institutional gaps. Our analysis extends Bozeman’s framework by proposing three additional dimensions for theorizing publicness in digital welfare states. The Korean case demonstrates that universal public financing alone cannot preserve publicness when service delivery is susceptible to platform intermediation.