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I like to tell people about your book and like, well, if you really want to understand the history of the health care regime in the United States, you have to understand like steel.

And they're like, what?

Can you talk about sort of the sort of the basics of your argument, how we go from this economy in the region in western

Pennsylvania based around steelmaking to health care? Yeah. So the kind of core argument of the book

is that a set of political compromises arise out of the class struggles in manufacturing,

in the case of Pittsburgh Steel, to kind of stabilize

class relations in the post-war period in that industry, which then have a set of kind of knock-on

consequences for the healthcare industry, particularly as those political compromises interact with the industrialization.

So let me break that down a little bit.

Steel industry gets organized like all of American mass production, basically in the 30s by the

CIA, you know, in the kind of moment of industrial workers upsurge.

And then in the late 40s after the war, the industrial union movement kind of encounters

the Cold War, right? And it has to kind of negotiate its place in Cold War American society.

It's a complex process involving conflict and compromise and repression and various things.

One element of that is the question of what the post-war welfare state is going to,

how it's going to be organized.

Historically, the labor movement has stood for up to this point,

the expansion of the socialization of welfare in various ways, including medicine.

And Harry Truman tries to do this, does not succeed, right? And there's a key moment when the industrial unions watch Truman struggling in DC and think,

you know what, this doesn't seem like it's going to work.

And we don't really have the political power anymore to deliver on something like this, like as a labor movement.

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