Application deadline: August 26, 2025 11:59 PM / Note: Course is in person only.

The Political Economy of Healthcare

Instructor: Thuy Linh Tu & Julie Livingston
Dates: Alt. Tuesdays, 7–9pm • September 9, September 23, October 7, and October 21, 2025
Location: Westside YMCA, Rm. 201, 5 West 63rd Street
Course cost: $35 DSA members / $45 nonmembers

Course Description:

This course will introduce students to the history and politics of the American health care system. It will examine two intertwined dynamics: first, how the organization of work, housing, leisure, consumption and other aspects of social life can make us sick; and, second, how our healthcare system profits from our illnesses and debilities. Our goal is to better understand how the modern healthcare system, which emerged in the early 20th century with the rise of the employer-sponsored health insurance plans, became a highly profitable industry; how it produced radical inequalities in access to care; and how it continues to extract time, money, and labor from vulnerable populations. We will discuss these issues in 4 class sessions.

Session 1 asks: Who is getting sick and how?

Session 2 asks: Who pays for care, who profits from it, and what happens if you can’t pay?

Session 3 will consider the labor of care at home and in institutions.

Session 4 will explore alternative models of healthcare, and other ways of imagining collective well-being.

Instructor Biography

Thuy Linh Tu is a professor at NYU, with interests in war and ecology; refugee and migration studies; visual and popular culture studies; transpacific and Asian/American studies. They are author of Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam and The Beautiful Generation: Asian Americans and the Cultural Economy of Fashion.

Julie Livingston is a professor at NYU, with interests in the body; Southern Africa; Interspecies; Gender; Development; Economic Growth/Degrowth; Public Health. Their books include Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt and Carcerality, Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic, and Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa.

About the NYC DSA Academy for Socialist Education
Education, broadly defined, is and always has been a vital function of revolutionary socialist movements. The NYC DSA Academy aims to enhance the ongoing political education efforts of the New York chapter of DSA. Designed to connect the history and theory of socialist struggles with the work of today’s activists, the Academy aims to offer a rigorous but accessible curriculum for working adults to develop their understanding and strategy.