By the end of the seventies, what i was describing as a kind of increasing working class helth care utilization phenomenon, it had n to the point that pittsburg generated a one point six inpatient hospital days per capita. A capital expansion in health care triples from 19 79 o 19 80. By the early eighties, is just growing at an extreme rate. And this becomes a problem for federal policy makers because of the way that it manifests in the form of a cost inflation for the medicare budget.
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
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Check out The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet, by David Carlin and Nicole Walker rosemetalpress.com/books/the-after-normal