Wealth & Money Quote by Ron Chernow

A biographer’s sentence doing the work of a historian and a diagnostician at once: Chernow isn’t just listing institutions, he’s staging a cascade of betrayals. Social Security and Medicare represent the old New Deal promise that aging wouldn’t mean destitution; banks stand for the supposedly boring machinery of trust that makes modern life possible; “conventional medical insurance” is the private-sector counterpart to public programs, and its inclusion is the tell. The point isn’t that one system failed. It’s that every major lane people were told to rely on-public, financial, and corporate-has started to feel rigged, leaky, or indifferent.

The repetition of “lost faith” is doing rhetorical heavy lifting. Faith is not the same as satisfaction; it’s emotional, quasi-religious, the sense that the structure will hold even when you can’t personally audit it. By framing the problem as a crisis of faith rather than policy, Chernow gets at the cultural consequence: once trust erodes, people don’t merely shop for better options; they look for alternative narratives. That’s where populism, conspiracy, and the romance of “outsider” fixes thrive.

Contextually, the pairing makes sense in a post-2008, post-managed-care America: retirement feels precarious, healthcare feels predatory, and finance feels abstract until it suddenly isn’t. The subtext is that institutional legitimacy is a finite resource. When it burns down across multiple pillars at once, the public starts treating stability as a scam-and the future as something you’re on your own to survive.