Medicare for All would save lives and money

10,000's of lives and 100,000,000,000's of dollars — year after year

From time to time, the self-inflicted wounds of a society are so wanton, so tragically wasteful, that even Ozymandias takes notice. When myriad lives are cast off like so many leaves shed to the ground, and treasure alike in the fever of human sacrifice — year upon year — at some point, a sapient person looks around and asks, simply, why?

Pardon the rhapsody, but entrenched problems evidently exceed conventional understanding, requiring more than pro forma recitation of platitudes and heuristics that have already proven insufficient. This webpage exists to advance public understanding of Medicare for All, as well as the political ecosystem in which such public policy is suspended: to catalyze the exchange of information that is the public process, with its collective awareness and manifold media of transmission, straining by turns toward a more perfect union.

For instance, you can post a sticker to spark a conversation, and then adaptively follow that up with your own words, like about how Medicare for All would save lives and money, or about how it's already favored by a majority of Americans. You can connect to more information through the links here, or guide someone else here so they can, or connect yourself and others to wherever you find salient. Learn something. Share something. Take a chance at making our community of millions a little better. The very concept of self-governance depends on your agency.

In keeping, please note that this webpage is not an endpoint. It's a jumping-off point, because that's how engagement works. As has been said (by many): success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts.

How long until we get it right?

How many lives? How many dollars? Whatever the delays, whatever the excuses; however much peddling of fear, uncertainty, and doubt; however much performative handwaving about helplessness, fluttering in the opera boxes: every year that goes by is lives lost and money lost. Let everyone opposed go on record. America, we can do better. Heck, we've done better. Think of World War II mobilization, eliminating smallpox or polio, establishing municipal sewer systems or fire departments. Don't look now — is that hope on the horizon?

Here're some online resources (if any seem long in the tooth, it's because the overall collective effort has been epic):

Recent & Pop Media:
Dr. Margaret Flowers on the looming crisis in America's for-profit health care system. (The Chris Hedges Report)
Universal Health Care Could Have Saved More Than 330,000 U.S. Lives during COVID [and a superordinate $105 billion] (Scientific American, originally Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA)
It's time for Medicare for All (Bernie Sanders op-ed, Fox News)
Medicare for All (Last Week Tonight with John Oliver)

Medicare for All basics:
Medicare for All Would Save $450 Billion Annually While Preventing 68,000 Deaths (Newsweek, originally The Lancet)
List of countries by life expectancy (Wikipedia)
List of countries by total health expenditure per capita (Wikipedia)
22 studies agree: 'Medicare for All' saves money (The Hill)
Getting the Polling Straight on Medicare for All (Public Citizen)
Frequently Asked Questions (National Nurses United)
Kitchen Table Campaign (Physicians for a National Health Program)

Note that science shows our political system does not operate as advertised,
Rich people rule! (Washington Post, originally "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" in Perspectives on Politics)
4 of the top 10 categories of lobbying spending are in the healthcare industry (Statista)

That said, adaptive and willful engagement can succeed where nothing else has previously,
“We Just Unionized Amazon”: How Two Best Friends Beat the Retail Giant’s Union-Busting Campaign (Democracy Now)

In our hands, our many hands

Be advised that our effort here is not about fundraising, not about outsourcing civic engagement using spare money in the fashion of billionaires. We don't don propriety at the door. We don't order out for moral agency: we carry it with us, like fire in a horn.

This effort is about shepherding both information and consciousness, about us together as both stakeholders and stewards. Awareness is not static, but in flux, moving through you, and everyone else around. What we uncover, what we piece together, what we transmit: we are all integral to collective understanding in a species of social learners, however incremental that role feels — and actually is — as one person in a society of millions.

The factual and moral relevancies of saving lives and money, as well as the individual and collective self-awarenesses of sanity and deviations therefrom, are refracted through your grasp and wielding of this information: what you incorporate, what you emanate. While it may often feel insignificant atomically, what we reason and say collectively (or don't) constitutes critical mass in society, with mortal consequences.

"Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love." - Reinhold Niebuhr