By Matt Underwood For 80 years, Republicans have blocked us from fixing our health care system.
It’s astonishing, isn’t it? The sheer longevity of this struggle. Eighty years ago, the seeds of a national health system were sown, a vision of healthcare for all, paid for through payroll taxes. President Truman championed this idea, a system that would have covered everything, from doctor visits to hospital stays. But the Republican response? A resounding “no.” They decried it as “socialized medicine,” and aligned themselves with the American Medical Association, which had its own plan, one that preserved the dominance of private insurance. It’s a pattern that has sadly repeated itself throughout the decades.
The impact of this consistent obstruction is profound. Imagine a world where your access to healthcare isn’t tied to your job, where unemployment doesn’t automatically mean losing coverage. Imagine a system that isn’t designed to primarily benefit insurance companies, a system where the focus is on the well-being of the patient, not the profit margin. It’s a vision that has been relentlessly thwarted.
The arguments against reform often center around fear. Fear of change, fear of higher taxes, fear of something being “un-American.” But beneath the surface, there’s a deeper, more troubling sentiment – a resistance to the idea of shared responsibility. This is what you could call “misanthropy dressed as individualism” – the belief that the potential for being exploited by others outweighs the very real suffering of millions. The reality is, it’s a choice made, time and time again. A choice to prioritize individual advantage over collective well-being.
The Affordable Care Act, for example, was watered down to appease these fears, entrenching private insurance and assuring Americans that they wouldn’t get “something for nothing.” We’ve seen it in the Democratic primary, where the value of negotiated private coverage was worried over and expressed by many. It’s a recurring theme: the reluctance to embrace the idea that healthcare is a right, not a privilege.
The Republican playbook has been consistent: “Repeal and Replace!” But when pressed for specifics, the plan often remains a secret, a void filled with vague promises. And the result? A system that maximizes cost and complexity while minimizing responsibility. This has resulted in a system that is deliberately complex and costly. Democrats are usually the ones stuck trying to compromise with this position. Republicans seem to always want to take it back to the past.
The forces working against change are powerful. The American Medical Association, for example, has been a significant obstacle, consistently lobbying against reform. And the insurance lobby, the pharmaceutical industry, and the corporations who benefit from health insurance being tied to employment, pour money into the system to maintain the status quo.
The consequences of this are clear. While other nations have embraced universal healthcare, the U.S. continues to grapple with a system that often fails its citizens. It is in part due to what the United States repeatedly rejected universal health care, knowingly, and democratically. This is the choice we’ve made, and until that moral choice is acknowledged, policy tinkering alone won’t suffice.
The fact is, even the ACA was originally a Republican idea. That’s right – a plan that ultimately resembles the ACA specifically as a counter-argument to universal healthcare. And now it’s “socialist.” This is a stark illustration of the lengths to which they have gone to prevent meaningful change, with politicians receiving benefits the general public can’t afford.
This isn’t just about Republicans, of course. Democrats have also played a role, with some siding with the insurance lobby or the AMA, even going as far as voting against public healthcare.