What COVID-19 Reveals About Twenty-First Century Capitalism: Adversity and Opportunity.

Twenty-first century capitalism features financialization and monopoly power. A structural perspective of contemporary political economy illuminates how these aspects shape the COVID-19 response. COVID-19 has exposed failures across health care systems, working conditions, supply chains, the depth of inequality, systemic racism, and features of globalization that exacerbate negative outcomes for the many. Examining access to medicines, personal protective equipment and vaccines, inequality and working conditions highlights just some of what is broken and what needs to be fixed. The unsparing challenge and immiseration of COVID-19 offer an opportunity to re-think basic structures of contemporary capitalism and re-imagine a more compassionate future.

21st-century capitalism: structural challenges for universal health care.

The structural perspective outlined here sheds light on some of the fundamental challenges involved in achieving Universal Health Care (UHC) in this twenty-first-century era of trade and financialized capitalism. This commentary explores connections between the structure of twenty-first-century capitalism and challenges to achieving UHC, discussing three features of today's capitalism: financialized capitalism; trade, intangibles and global value chains; and inequality (as exacerbated by the first two features). The final section discusses the various opportunities for reform to facilitate UHC-from tinkering with the status quo, to deeper regulatory reform and fundamental structural change.