Thank you for your response. A healthy economy depends on healthy workers and I am fully supportive of Medicare4All as the best method of achieving that. We are the only wealthy nation to not adopt some universal system of delivery of or payment for healthcare costs. Most have had their systems in place since WWII out of necessity and not one has made a serious attempt to repeal their system in favor of our insurance model. Only a fool, or a corrupt politician, advocates against such strong evidence when data is available to anyone with an internet connection.
It is important to remind Americans that spending on the common welfare is mandated to Congress in Article 1: Section 8 of our Constitution and is not “socialism” unless the opposition wishes to admit that our founders were the socialist renegades of their day. Those wise men had visions of America achieving anything that it could imagine and not only what it could afford, so they established a system that makes anything that exists affordable, regardless of any revenue stream, or the absence of such.
They established the people’s house of Congress as the monopoly issuer of the currency and only subsequent attempts to limit that power of the purse have stood in the way of achieving their vision. Since we abandoned the gold standard almost a half-century ago, such limitations exist only in popular myths perpetuated by fear and a disturbingly racist envy of anyone who the population doesn’t regard as deserving of the basic guarantees afforded all in the Constitution. First and foremost of those guarantees is life, and that cannot be achieved without universal access to the best healthcare the nation can provide.
Objections to that goal, especially the tired but persistent “how will you pay for it?” question, are simply invalidated by our founding documents and the fact that the currency is a no-cost commodity that Congress has been given to enable it to dream big and form the society accordingly. Inflation is always a real concern, but it is the only one we face. Congress will pay for single payer healthcare as it pays for anything else. It will appropriate the funding and the required money will appear in the Treasury by keystrokes on a computer at the Federal Reserve. Any misery in America that can be mitigated by federal spending is strictly a political, not economic, decision.
