From precarious Employment to Precarious Retirement: Neoliberal Health and Long-Term Care in the United States

Abstract

Neoliberal political economies have emerged across the west over the last 40 years. This development has been driven by several forces including public policy regimes that prioritize privatization of public assets and services, deregulation of the economy, reduced taxes on high incomes and wealth and use of public revenues to bail out corporate entities that are “too big to fail”. This chapter draws on Streeck’s theory of the Consolidation State dominated by corporate priorities. It describes how neoliberal policy priorities, especially privatization, are being implemented in the health and long term care systems in the U.S, and how these are in turn creating the same levels of economic insecurity and precarity in the context of work and retirement over the last 20 plus years.