What's Wrong With Health Care Costs?

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The health care reform of the 1980s was intended to make hospitals more efficient and productive. Instead, it created a market in high reimbursing interventions that were dominated by well-capitalized institutions like pittsburg hospital. The wealthy academic hospitals are able to buy them up where they think there's an advantage in controlling the market or even close them down. This is really the vulgar shock coming to the health care system," he says.

Historian Gabriel Winant discusses The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America. It's a fascinating study of the emergence of the service sector and a new working class out of the wreckage of deindustrialization through the story of the rise and fall of unionized steel in Pittsburgh and its replacement by a massive hospital industry. Listen to my past interview with Winant on the social worlds that make US politics and how that sociality is rooted in the economy, carceral state, social media, religion, and more thedigradio.com/podcast/the-social-question-with-gabriel-winant Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Check out The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet, by David Carlin and Nicole Walker rosemetalpress.com/books/the-after-normal