In 2017, Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress tried to eviscerate the A.C.A. and almost succeeded in passing a bill that the Congressional Budget Office estimated would have left 22 million more Americans uninsured by 2026. There’s every reason to believe that if the G.O.P. wins control of Congress and the White House in November, it will once again try to bring back the bad old days of health coverage. And it will probably succeed, since it failed in 2017 only thanks to a principled stand by John McCain — something unlikely to happen in today’s Republican Party, where slavish obedience to Trump has become almost universal.
If you want to preserve that access to health insurance, it’s worth checking your voter registration, getting involved as a volunteer for the Democrats and doing what you can afford to provide financial support
People are definitely going to cover the political, corrupt reasons but one historic reason is that we didn’t have the destruction of WWII in the U.S. Britain’s National Health Service was created in 1946. Germany’s was created during the war in 1941. In many ways, WWII is what created the conditions for universal healthcare in Europe.
In the U.S., we never had an equivalent crisis and so we basically have a non-system made out of kludges and duct tape. There’s no one government program but instead, several programs that were meant to be reforms but just added to the mess. To quote the Census:
And in the end, 92% of people end up covered. It might be shitty coverage and no one likes the mess of programs but sometimes, it takes a true crisis like WWII to make radical reforms.