The ultimate fear was of hospital system overload. Hospital systems with more reserve capacity raised the survival threshold and the pace at which economic and social life could return to normal. Hospitals, however, are not outside the economy or society. By 2020, hospitals were no longer the giant organizational monoliths of the mid-twentieth century.44 Since the 1980s they had been incorporated not just into the economy—they were always part of that—but into the market. They had become sites for experiments in modern management.45 They were slimmed-down just-in-time operations, or at least
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