in a pandemic environment there is a high risk of any such institution — but particularly one where beds have been financialized — becoming a lazaretto, if not a charnel house

One manifestation of this generational imbalance of power is the immense difficulty of health-care reform, since major constituencies — not just profiteering corporations, but segments of the markets they’ve captured, and the people who compose those segments — are materially tied to the current system. This is the underlying social basis of the attempts to fend off Medicare for All through appeals to incumbent health insurance, in particular Medicare itself. “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” is not — contra liberal snobbery — simply ignorance and false consciousness. It is rather, as Esping-Andersen would put it, the slogan of asymmetric chronopolitics. It is important to understand that chronopolitics is nothing more than the political and cultural modality in which class conflict in recent decades has appeared: the conflict between generations is not fundamental but is rather the outcome of specific historical developments, which have turned age into the medium of conflicts flowing from the relations of property. But this does not make generational conflict superficial, any more than the mediation of class through race makes race superficial. There is a genuine divergence in life chances and social power along the lines of age.