The only opinion that matters for the government is the opinion of the 1%.

Seriously? Because that's money flowing in the "wrong" direction, that is away from billionaires' pockets.

Medicare for all and legal pot both have had an around 70% approval rate for about a decade now. The government simply doesnt care because those things do not make the right people rich. Studies have shown the US gov doesn't respond to its voters, it responds to its financiers. It honest to god never mattered what we thought.

"why isn't the crumbling fascist imperial regime providing me healthcare?" is a question that answers itself OP

Capitalists control the political system of the US. Its not a democracy, it's a capitalist dictatorship.

What health-care systems it used to have, were only to quell decades of worker struggles fighting for equivalent health care systems the USSR was putting in place in the 1920s.

Because the politicians who could allow it are bribed by health insurance lobbyists to not allow it. There's a lot of money at stake for a relative few people, and they'll do anything to not risk it.

Like most of these kinds of problems, the answer can be boiled down to a simple commonality: The people who stand to lose the most from things changing for the better are the same people who have the most power to influence the outcomes. The only thing that can counter that is a strong labor movement.

Now, there is a more complicated question to be asked about why US labor movements have been less successful than their European counterparts, but that I don’t have an easy answer for.

People can demand it, but that isn't how we could ever get it. The privatized healthcare system makes too much money and the left in the US Empire is only recently beginning to recover from the Red Scare and systematic dismantling by the state in the 20th century.

Follow the money: the current system makes more sense for private insurers, pharma, and large healthcare providers who all benefit from things staying as they are.

But it’s not just about corporations. The US also built its system around employer-based insurance back in World War II, and now healthcare is tied to your job. That creates risk: leaving your job can mean losing coverage, which naturally makes people more cautious and dependent on poor employment. This also makes people more cautious about starting up a business so the economy becomes controlled in the hands of a few - and so more oligarchic

There’s also a cultural angle. In the US, “freedom” is often seen as freedom from government involvement, even if that sometimes means less practical freedom (like being unable to change jobs easily), and the individual spending more on insurance than they would on taxes.

So it’s not one single reason - it’s money, history, and mindset all reinforcing each other.

Rigidity and social control also show up in other countries with strategies like high housing costs.

In the USA, there is little corruption officially; that's only because bribery is legal. Billionaires, Corporations, Banks and even other nations like Saudi Arabia can "contribute" huge amounts of money without even revealing who they are.

Insurers, drug manufacturers and other interested parties "donate" many millions of dollars through these Super PACs and shell companies to keep things as they like them.

The voters are too busy juggling low-wage jobs to compete with the multi-generational wealth accumulators; on top of this, they pay more taxes in more ways than any other generation before.

Our representatives won't bite the hand that feeds them willingly, and are legally protected to continue doing so.

People's standard of living and life spans are shrinking as a result. See Citizens United, Super PACs, Panama Papers and Pandora Papers for more details.

There's so much, unions squashed, down to 10% of workforce and those are mostly police and government ironically. Check out Patriot Act if you wonder why there's so little organizing. The FED haha it never ends

I feel like we Marxists have explained why hundreds of times in dozens of ways already.

Because of decades of lobbying by the for-profit healthcare industry.

Why didn't nazi Germany have universal healthcare?

What kept people from demanding it?

Regulatory capture. The government is funded by the medical insurance companies. The people haven't demanded it because they've been told it's not an option. It's impossible, too expensive, a fantasy.

Helps keep people enlisting when the only way they can have their basic needs met is to sign up with the evil empire.

Capitalism, severely lowered expectations, mainstream news media controlled by the billionaire class pumping out capitalist propaganda. People continuing to believe the Democratic Party wants to enact universal healthcare when all elected Dems really care about is staying in power, doing the bare minimum, and raking in the cash from their billionaire donors. People continuing to vote for Democrats based on that belief when they could be using their votes to vote in anti-capitalist candidates from the real left (Green Party, PSL, etc).

When Democrats are in charge of all of the levers of power, they say: “Darn there are all these rules we have to follow and the Republicans are obstructing us and won’t budge. Oh well, better luck next time 🤷‍♂️” while behind closed doors they’re listening to the health insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies who offer them money and perks and special treatment and job offers in the industry once they’re out of office.

The companies make too much money, and the same companies dictate policy to the government.

The USA is not a democracy.

The powerful have convinced the masses that paying a single dime extra in taxes is just about the worst thing you could be forced to do, including whatever happened on that Island. So the common people are unable to reconcile that everyone paying higher taxes will make healthcare better for everyone. Normal people get to stay sick, poor, and rely on GoFundMe or die prematurely while the powerful laugh and count their money. It’s a fucking GRIFT.

It would take a lot of pressure off of people to grind themselves down for profits as well as demonstrate that a government can actually take care of people, two precedents the capitalist class absolutely refuses to set.

I watched a video today that said just the bureaucratic overhead of healthcare in the US accounts for 10% of our GDP. So it's probably mostly just bribe money from the insurance companies keeping our elected representatives from doing anything in our interest.

the Hospital Corporation of America makes $70b+ a year

We do demand it, they don't give a fuck. Even with insurance you can't get help. Can't even leave this place without being rich. Land of the free my ass.

Because people who have a job with benefits feel like they’ve worked their way up the chain to earn those benefits. People who work but don’t have benefits just don’t work hard enough. And let’s not even talk about those who don’t work.

We need to divorce healthcare from employment.

There isn't an organized group for it, but there are organized groups against it.

The two attempts to do so, in 1993 and 2009, saw little organized political activity in favor of creating a single payer system while there was organized political resistance against it.

If politicians lose their seats trying to support a single payer system, they won't be around after the next election.

Because our sclerotic legislature and campaign finance systems ensure that every single function of “democratic” society is fully and totally captured by the interests of capital

The people essentially have been demanding it. As several others have mentioned in this thread, 70-80% of the public supports universal healthcare in some form. For the nitty-gritty, basically 50 years ago and earlier, extremely wealthy people realised that their preferred policies weren't especially popular with the general public. They identified that their main issue was that what they had was money, not people. So they embarked on a decades long quest to give money the same (or greater) political power as individuals, culminating in the Citizen's United Supreme Court case. I bring this up because it essentially means that the People demanding it doesn't matter, because while there may be a couple hundred million people asking for it, there's a couple hundred billion dollars asking to never do it. It's gotten so bad that there's a kind of perverse, Stockholm Syndrome effect starting to happen to. In 2016 there was a big dust-up during the Democratic Primary where the Culinary Union in Las Vegas/Nevada didn't want to endorse Bernie Sanders, the most pro-Union candidate in decades, essentially because medicare-for-all would remove health insurance as a bargaining chip

The cult of the line goes up

In order to understand that, it helps to look why we never got it to begin with. Do you think this system where we all suffer so a few can be rich was the first thing that came to mind, and then civilization evolved to be better so we got universal health care? No, people cooperated first, and then when communications technology started forming more centralization, started building a pathway to universal healthcare.

But this is America! It's a settler colonial empire! So of course it was the former slaves who were building cooperatives, and organized labor building a pathway to universal healthcare, and white racists with all the money and power to turn those systems of cooperative support into siphons for them to suck us dry from.

because that's not profitable enough for capitalism and the oligarchs