Nation January 19, 2022
A conversation with George Aumoithe on the history of disease prevention, the economic roots of the crisis American hospitals face, and why we need to do better.
One glaring revelation of the Covid-19 crisis is how ill-prepared the United States turned out to be for an unexpected national medical emergency. There are deep historical reasons for why our welfare state proved incapable of dealing with the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic—reasons that predate the Trump administration’s mismanagement. Decades of economic decision-making that prioritized a market-driven system ignored the kind of welfare distribution necessary to deal with the potential challenges of a large-scale crisis like Covid-19.
As is so often the case, the long-term consequences of this deprioritizing of care fell...