What is care and who is paying for it? Every one of us will need care at some point in life: social care, healthcare, childcare, eldercare. In the shadow of COVID-19, care has become the most urgent topic of our times. But our care systems are in crisis. Concern for the most vulnerable has been overtaken by an obsession with profits and productivity. How did we end up here? In an era of economic turmoil, lower birth rates and increased life expectancy mean a larger proportion of the population than ever before is of retirement age. As a result, more people need care, and their numbers are rising. Yet, despite the demand, public services continue to be cut and sold off. Those most in need are left to fend for themselves. In this groundbreaking book, Emma Dowling charts the multifaceted nature of care in the modern world, from the mantras of self-care and what they tell us about our anxieties to the state of the social care system. The Care Crisis examines the ways that profitability and care are played off against each other, exposing the impacts of financialisation and austerity. Dowling charts the current experiments in short-term solutions now taking place. In a new afterword, she examines the care crisis through the lens of the Covid-19 pandemic, revealing the devastating consequences of a collision between an ongoing care crisis and the coronavirus.

A vital collection bringing together Black Lives Matter and COVID-19 from the acclaimed political and literary magazine Boston Review. From the COVID-19 pandemic to uprisings over police brutality, we are living in the greatest social crisis of a generation. But the roots of these latest emergencies stretch back decades. At their core is a politics of death: a brutal neoliberal ideology that combines deep structural racism with a relentless assault on social welfare. Its results are the failing economic and public health systems we confront today--those that benefit the few and put the most vulnerable in harm's way. Contributors to this volume not only protest these neoliberal roots of our present catastrophe, but they insist there is only one way forward: a new kind of politics--a politics of care--that centers people's basic needs and connections to fellow citizens, the global community, and the natural world. Imagining a world that promotes the health and well-being of all, they draw on different backgrounds--from public health to philosophy, history to economics, literature to activism--as well as the example of other countries and the past, from the AIDS activist group ACT-UP to the Black radical tradition. Together they point to a future, as Simon Waxman writes, where "no one is disposable." CONTRIBUTORS Robin D. G. Kelley, Gregg Gonsalves and Amy Kapczynski, Walter Johnson, Anne L. Alstott, Melvin Rogers, Amy Hoffman, Sunaura Taylor, Vafa Ghazavi, Adele Lebano, Paul Hockenos, Paul Katz and Leandro Ferreira, Shaun Ossei-Owusu, , Colin Gordon, Jason Q. Purnell, Jamala Rogers, Dan Berger, Julie Kohler, Manoj Dias-Abey, Simon Waxman, Farah Griffin. A co-publication between Boston Review and Verso Books.

America's health care troubles largely stem from a great success: modern medicine can do much more today than in the past. So what's the trouble? How to pay for it. In easily comprehensible prose, MIT-trained economist Arnold Kling explains better ways of financing health care for the poor, workers, the disabled, and the elderly. Kling predicts relying less on government and more on private savings would improve health outcomes. A must-read for health care reformers.

We are in the midst of a global crisis of care. How do we get out of it? The Care Manifesto puts care at the heart of the debates of our current crisis: from intimate care--childcare, healthcare, elder care--to care for the natural world. We live in a world where carelessness reigns, but it does not have to be this way. The Care Manifesto puts forth a vision for a truly caring world. The authors want to reimagine the role of care in our everyday lives, making it the organising principle in every dimension and at every scale of life. We are all dependent on each other, and only by nurturing these interdependencies can we cultivate a world in which each and every one of us can not only live but thrive. The Care Manifesto demands that we must put care at the heart of the state and the economy. A caring government must promote collective joy, not the satisfaction of individual desire. This means the transformation of how we organise work through co-operatives, localism and nationalisation. It proposes the expansion of our understanding of kinship for a more 'promiscuous care'. It calls for caring places through the reclamation of public space, to make a more convivial city. It sets out an agenda for the environment, most urgent of all, putting care at the centre of our relationship to the natural world.

“I’ve totally washed away the dream of having one more child.” “I had never intended to be a stay-at-home-parent, but the cost of child care turned me into one.” “We had to pull our toddler out of his program because we couldn’t afford to have two kids in high-quality care.” These are not the voices of those down on their luck, but the voices of America’s middle class. The lack of affordable, available, high-quality childcare is a boulder on the backs of all but the most affluent. Millions of hard-working families are left gasping for air while the next generation misses out on a strong start. To date, we’ve been fighting this five-alarm fire with the policy equivalent of beach toy water buckets. It’s time for a bold investment in America’s families and America’s future. There’s only one viable solution: Childcare should be free.

Former Senate Majority Leader Daschle presents this hard-hitting policy guideto reforming Americas broken healthcare system.

A deadly pandemic. Civic unrest. Economic uncertainty. The years between the 2016 and 2020 Presidential Elections exposed the vulnerability of our institutions—and ourselves—like never before. In the wake of uncertainty, the authors in this volume offer wisdom to make sense of the changes brought by these past four years. Reflecting how faith and philanthropy converge, they imagine alternative economies for faith communities, academia, and nonprofits, while also marking the unshakable encounter with grief and crisis. Authors linger in the space between what was and what will be to ask: what do we leave behind, what do we bring with us, and what possibilities exist where crisis and care converge? Their words and wisdom kindle philanthropic imagination in this moment of transition and change.

At present, human society is facing a health care crisis that is affecting patients worldwide. In the United States, it is generally believed that the major problem is lack of affordable access to health care (i.e. health insurance). This book takes an unprecedented approach to address this issue by proposing that the major problem is not lack of affordable access to health care per se, but lack of access to better, safer, and more affordable medicines. The latter problem is present not only in the United States and the developing world but also in countries with socialized health care systems, such as Europe and the rest of the industrialized world. This book provides a comparative analysis of the health care systems throughout the world and also examines the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. - Examines the health care structure of the United States, Europe, and the third world, both separately and comparatively - Offers primary source insight through in-depth interviews with pharmaceutical and health care industry leaders from around the world - Carefully explains, in clear terms, the intricacies of the health care and pharmaceutical system and how these intricacies have led to the current crisis - Offers concrete, comprehensive solutions to the health care crisis

Years of remodelling the welfare state, the rise of technology, and the growing power of neoliberal government apparatuses have established a society of the precarious. In this new reality, productivity is no longer just a matter of labour, but affects the formation of the self, blurring the division between personal and professional lives. Encouraged to believe ourselves flexible and autonomous, we experience a creeping isolation that has both social and political impacts, and serves the purposes of capital accumulation and social control. In State of Insecurity, Isabell Lorey explores the possibilities for organization and resistance under the contemporary status quo, and anticipates the emergence of a new and disobedient self-government of the precarious.