America needs a national health care system.

There's only one person in the photograph that's published on this page,

it's from a recent G7 meeting, who represents a country where an illness can destroy an entire family,

leaving them bankrupt and homeless, with the repercussions of that sudden fall into poverty,

echoing down through generations.

Most Americans have no idea that the

United States is quite literally the only country in the developed world that doesn't define

health care as an absolute right for all its citizens. That's it. We're the only one left. The United

States spends more on health care than any other country in the world, about 17% of GDP.

Switzerland, Germany, France, Sweden, and Japan all average around 11%. In Canada, Denmark, Belgium, Austria, Norway, Netherlands, United Kingdom, New Zealand, and

Australia all come in between 9.3 and 10.5%.

Health insurance premiums right now make up about 22% of all taxable payroll, whereas Medicare

for all would run an estimated 10%. We are literally the only developed country in the world with an

entire multi-billion dollar for-profit industry devoted to parasitically extracting money from us

to then turn over to health care providers on our behalf. The for-profit health insurance

industry has attached itself to us like a giant blood-sucking tick. And it's not like we haven't

tried. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Jack Kennedy, and Lyndon

Johnson all proposed and made an effort to bring about a national health care system to the United States.

There's one example really worth watching where President Kennedy is pushing a single-payer system, as opposed to Britain's socialist model.

They all failed, and when I did a deep dive into the topic two years ago from my book, The Hidden History of American Healthcare, I found two major barriers to our removing that tick from our backs.

The early opposition, more than 100 years ago to a national health care system, came from

southern white congressmen, they were all men, and senators who didn't want even the possibility

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