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.

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.

Seriously? Because that’s money flowing in the “wrong” direction, that is away from billionaires’ pockets.

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

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

Medicare for all and legal pot both have has 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.

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

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

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

The USA is not a democracy.

The cult of the line goes up

It would take a lot of pressure off of people to grind themselves down for profits as well as demonstrate that the government can actually do good things, two precedents the capitalist class absolutely will.not accept.

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

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

“why isn’t the crumbling fascist imperial regime providing me healthcare?” is a question that answers itself OP

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

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.

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

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.

I fully support it but only for non-obese, US citizens. Everyone else should get taxed for it but not have access.

I haven’t seen that proposal yet.

More corrupt and less democratic than the countries that have got it probably

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.

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

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.

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.

Ask the shareholders and 1%.

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.

Cause that’s “commumism.”

The US government fundamentally doesn’t give a crap about your wellbeing. In fact if you die at 56 instead of 76 the government can cheap out of approximately 16 years of paying you a retirement.

Because conservatives do not want tax dollars going to people in outgroups.