28.1 million uninsured was an historic low for this cesspool of a nation.
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2017/demo/p60-260.htmlBut, wait! Let me anticipate your response: "Yabut that's better than it had been and that's the best we can do." Right?
You know what really bothers me about the kind of crap that, most recently, Klobachar spews? Crap like, "If I could wave a magic wand and make college free I'd love to do that, but we can't afford it" and "How is Bernie going to pay for Universal Healthcare? We simply can't afford it"? With respect to tuition free college - WE HAVE ALREADY DONE THAT FFS! In 1977 if you were a California resident you paid *no tuition* at all. I know because I was a freshman in the Fall of 1977. We must have been doing exceedingly well at the time then, right? Ever heard of the OPEC oil embargo? Care to guess what that did to the economy? And somehow, we were still able to "afford" tuition-free college.
If you read the article I posted about the fight to get Medicare, you'll recognize the arguments the private health insurance corporations made back then as it was considered. You'll also recognize those same arguments from the 1990's. If we, as Americans, are decent enough people to be firm in our conviction that no one should lose their home if a family member falls ill (and whether we, on the whole, are those sorts of people is an argument in and of itself), a successful effort for MFA will have to at least begin from the ground up. And please don't let's forget that Medicare
was already a compromise with private health insurers.This will be even harder than past battles, though, because here we're talking about replacing private, for-profit insurance with public, non-profit insurance instead of covering the folks that private, for-profit corporations won't.
Americans' antipathy for the common good and reverence for greed, I will grant, may make such an effort impossible here. But don't expect me to laud that or call any half-assed attempt to pretend to be decent (read: PPACA) "good."
One last thing. I don't recall anyone saying, "BUT! BUT! BUT! HOW ARE WE GOING TO PAY FOR IT?!!?!!ONE" when JFK made
this speech. But, we were different people then. No three people in the US owned more wealth than the bottom 50 per cent. In other words, our true values were not as blatantly on display then.
Yeah, all the millions who have health care now are "dead from the neck up". Yeah... :-/
