What’s keeping people from demanding it?
The only opinion that matters for the government is the opinion of the 1%.
Seriously? Because that’s money flowing in the “wrong” direction, that is away from billionaires’ pockets.
This is literally all there is to it, along with indentured servitude by tying insurance to employment on top of it. This country’s fucked up healthcare system keeps the billionaires happy and the people stuck appeasing them.
Medicare for all and legal pot both have had an around 70% approval rate for about a decade now. The government simply doesnt care because those things do not make the right people rich. Studies have shown the US gov doesn’t respond to its voters, it responds to its financiers. It honest to god never mattered what we thought.
People can demand it, but that isn’t how we could ever get it. The privatized healthcare system makes too much money and the left in the US Empire is only recently beginning to recover from the Red Scare and systematic dismantling by the state in the 20th century.
Now that the Red Scare is largely over, the United States is being dismantled by a compromised president controlled by Russia in the 21st century.Born too early to see the US being dismantled by Russia, born too late to see the US being dismantled by Russia, born just in time to see the US being dismantled by Russia.I am ignorant of modern geopolitics. Have no pity for me. I will go learn.
This isn’t true, though. Trump just isn’t quite as hawkish on Russia as many liberals would like, but if he was actually compromised he would be lifting sanctions and wouldn’t be attacking Russian allies like Iran and Venezuela.
Now that the Red Scare is largely over
It never ended and won’t be over until capitalism is dead. What do you think the bullshit about a “Uyghur genocide” was for?
House votes to denounce ‘horrors’ of socialism ahead of Mamdani-Trump meeting
I can see that I’m not as well-read on the state of affairs as everyone else, and also I just noticed that I’m on .ml.
My apologies. I’ll remove myself from this instance until I am less ignorant about the world I live in.
Helps keep people enlisting when the only way they can have their basic needs met is to sign up with the evil empire.
I feel like we Marxists have explained why hundreds of times in dozens of ways already.
Regulatory capture. The government is funded by the medical insurance companies. The people haven’t demanded it because they’ve been told it’s not an option. It’s impossible, too expensive, a fantasy.
Because of decades of lobbying by the for-profit healthcare industry.
It would take a lot of pressure off of people to grind themselves down for profits as well as demonstrate that a government can actually take care of people, two precedents the capitalist class absolutely refuses to set.
Capitalists control the political system of the US. Its not a democracy, it’s a capitalist dictatorship.
What health-care systems it used to have, were only to quell decades of worker struggles fighting for equivalent health care systems the USSR was putting in place in the 1920s.
That article and those linked within are a goldmine. Thank you for sharing.
No probs!
The cult of the line goes up
For people to demand anything you’ll need a democracy. For people to want universal healthcare they need to understand that socializing the health cost is a benefit for the population.
Add the words together and you get social democracy.
In most countries this is what lead to universal healthcare. In most countries the social democracy parties were founded by labour unions.
Despite USA being first with labour unions, they never really succeeded, because they were violently struck down early on.
Anyway, it’s that simple: Join a union, let the union establish a political party, let the party make universal healthcare. I know that seems very uphill, but it doesn’t actually have to take centuries to do.
When the first unions were formed in Europe, the workers also expected it to be a multigenerational battle, and yet decided to try it in the vague hope that it might eventually benefit their grandchildren. However they were so successful that they achieved the goal within their own lifetime.
You’re also missing the vital context that it was the soviet union being right next door, with their massive expansions in social safety nets, that forced western countries into capitulating to worker demands. It also misses that these safety nets in western countries are funded by imperialism, creating a domestic working class with class interests aligned with imperialism, rather than against it.
The US the first with Labour Unions?
In the USA, there is little corruption officially; that’s only because bribery is legal. Billionaires, Corporations, Banks and even other nations like Saudi Arabia can “contribute” huge amounts of money without even revealing who they are.
Insurers, drug manufacturers and other interested parties “donate” many millions of dollars through these Super PACs and shell companies to keep things as they like them.
The voters are too busy juggling low-wage jobs to compete with the multi-generational wealth accumulators; on top of this, they pay more taxes in more ways than any other generation before.
Our representatives won’t bite the hand that feeds them willingly, and are legally protected to continue doing so.
People’s standard of living and life spans are shrinking as a result. See Citizens United, Super PACs, Panama Papers and Pandora Papers for more details.
There’s so much, unions squashed, down to 10% of workforce and those are mostly police and government ironically. Check out Patriot Act if you wonder why there’s so little organizing. The FED haha it never ends
The companies make too much money, and the same companies dictate policy to the government.
The USA is not a democracy.
The people essentially have been demanding it. As several others have mentioned in this thread, 70-80% of the public supports universal healthcare in some form. For the nitty-gritty, basically 50 years ago and earlier, extremely wealthy people realised that their preferred policies weren’t especially popular with the general public. They identified that their main issue was that what they had was money, not people. So they embarked on a decades long quest to give money the same (or greater) political power as individuals, culminating in the Citizen’s United Supreme Court case. I bring this up because it essentially means that the People demanding it doesn’t matter, because while there may be a couple hundred million people asking for it, there’s a couple hundred billion dollars asking to never do it. It’s gotten so bad that there’s a kind of perverse, Stockholm Syndrome effect starting to happen to. In 2016 there was a big dust-up during the Democratic Primary where the Culinary Union in Las Vegas/Nevada didn’t want to endorse Bernie Sanders, the most pro-Union candidate in decades, essentially because medicare-for-all would remove health insurance as a bargaining chip
