"The only thing dividing Americans is how to pay for it"

Sadly, this is the easy part. We can pay for it in the same way we pay for perpetual war and tax cuts. We simply legislate it in Congress and the money appears to make it happen via keystrokes on computers. No taxes or borrowing are necessary.

The challenge is convincing the people and their elected representatives that this is the reality of federal finance and money creation as long as the required resources are available. That may mean, especially in some of the states, that more must be spent to train and recruit more medical staff and pay for infrastructure, but that is no more difficult for our currency issuing government than is any other expenditure.

Mr. Roseberry, like millions of other Americans, found himself on the losing end of the political choice between the public's health and the profits of the corporate healthcare system. Like so many choices our Congress makes, misery that can be mitigated by using federal money to deploy resources "for the common welfare", is entirely a political choice made by those elected to represent the people and their Constitution that "mandates" the opposite.