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What's keeping people from demanding it?

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[-] BigTuffAl@lemmy.zip 14 points 1 hour ago

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

[-] DFX4509B@lemmy.wtf 7 points 1 hour ago

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

[-] umbrella@lemmy.ml 2 points 47 minutes ago

because they gotta spend a literal trillion a year to kill brown people worldwide instead.

[-] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 2 points 32 minutes ago

It's actually cheaper to do single payer healthcare, but because profit rules all the empire does this.

[-] nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 27 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

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.

[-] SteveCC@lemmy.world 1 points 50 minutes ago
[-] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 2 points 30 minutes ago

Congress represents capitalists and works for them, not the working classes. Any plan that cannot address the class conflict and the nature of the capitalist state instruments to uphold their class interests is doomed to fail.

[-] aReallyCrunchyLeaf@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 hour ago

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

[-] driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br 43 points 3 hours ago

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

[-] deranger@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 hour ago

This isn’t any exaggeration: it has been demonstrated using statistical analysis

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

[-] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 1 points 53 minutes ago

Too many people with too much power are making too much money, so they all work together to keep the cash cow going. It’s become pretty clear that’s what the US has reduced itself to at this point. It’s kinda nakedly obvious this whole thing is a giant fucking Ponzi scheme at this point - I’m fairly certain I’m never getting the social security I’ve payed into for my whole career.

[-] DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 40 points 3 hours ago

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

[-] nfreak@lemmy.ml 19 points 3 hours ago

This is literally all there is to it, along with indentured servitude by tying insurance to employment on top of it. This country's fucked up healthcare system keeps the billionaires happy and the people stuck appeasing them.

[-] RiverRock@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

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.

[-] davel@lemmy.ml 11 points 2 hours ago

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

[-] reagansrottencorpse@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 hours ago

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

[-] whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 2 hours ago

The cult of the line goes up

[-] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 14 points 3 hours ago

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.

[-] tanisnikana@lemmy.world -3 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

~~Now that the Red Scare is largely over, the United States is being dismantled by a compromised president controlled by Russia in the 21st century.~~

~~Born too early to see the US being dismantled by Russia, born too late to see the US being dismantled by Russia, born just in time to see the US being dismantled by Russia.~~

I am ignorant of modern geopolitics. Have no pity for me. I will go learn.

[-] davel@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 hours ago

Now that the Red Scare is largely over

It never ended and won’t be over until capitalism is dead. What do you think the bullshit about a “Uyghur genocide” was for?

House votes to denounce ‘horrors’ of socialism ahead of Mamdani-Trump meeting

[-] tanisnikana@lemmy.world -1 points 2 hours ago

I can see that I’m not as well-read on the state of affairs as everyone else, and also I just noticed that I’m on .ml.

My apologies. I’ll remove myself from this instance until I am less ignorant about the world I live in.

[-] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 9 points 2 hours ago

This isn't true, though. Trump just isn't quite as hawkish on Russia as many liberals would like, but if he was actually compromised he would be lifting sanctions and wouldn't be attacking Russian allies like Iran and Venezuela.

[-] techwooded@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 hour ago

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

[-] SteveCC@lemmy.world 1 points 47 minutes ago
[-] digdilem@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 hours ago

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

The USA is not a democracy.

[-] venusaur@lemmy.world -1 points 3 hours ago

Everybody has to want it, including majority of politicians in power.

[-] DagwoodIII@piefed.social -3 points 3 hours ago

Because the Dems would need a supermajority in both Houses. They had one in 2010 and still had to worry about defectors.

Look at the record, the GOP is going to fight anything that actually helps people.

The GOP has convinced a large percentage of the voters that they will lose everything if the 'socialists' take over.

[-] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 18 points 3 hours ago

The dems aren't interested in dismantling the private healthcare industry. It's too profitable and their donors need it.

[-] TiredTiger@lemmy.ml 2 points 43 minutes ago

Even while I was still a clueless lib, when I saw insurance companies sponsoring the DNC, I knew we'd never get publicly-funded healthcare.

[-] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 1 points 33 minutes ago

Yep, great point! Gotta connect class interests.

[-] eldavi@lemmy.ml 13 points 3 hours ago

the democrats have had the opportunity to remove the super majority requirement from 2021 to 2023; again from 2007 to 2011; and again from 1987 to 1995, yet they chose not to.

[-] SteveCC@lemmy.world 1 points 45 minutes ago* (last edited 45 minutes ago)

It's not red v blue. It's people vs $s.

A plan - https://represent.us/

Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfQij4aQq1k

[-] disregardable@lemmy.zip 6 points 3 hours ago

To be clear, the guys who voted against it in 2010 were literal 70 year old boomers who were raised in McCarthyism and scared of communism. Like actually cited that "it's too communist" as a reason to vote against it.

this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
42 points (97.7% liked)

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