{"id":228928,"date":"2026-10-27T20:27:05","date_gmt":"2026-10-27T20:27:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/is-universal-healthcare-finally-becoming-a-vote-winning-issue-in-us-elections-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2026-10-27T20:27:05","modified_gmt":"2026-10-27T20:27:05","slug":"is-universal-healthcare-finally-becoming-a-vote-winning-issue-in-us-elections-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/is-universal-healthcare-finally-becoming-a-vote-winning-issue-in-us-elections-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"Is universal healthcare finally becoming a vote-winning issue in US elections? – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

Democrats in the midterms are finally backing Medicare for All as a campaign issue amid a rising tide of US support
A<\/span>bdul El-Sayed, the Democratic US Senate<\/a> candidate, starts this day on the campaign trail in Escanaba, Michigan, where nearby Wisconsin dairy country spills into dense forests and the sandy shores of Green Bay.
This is the upper peninsula \u2013 the \u201cUP\u201d \u2013 a rural slash of land north of Michigan\u2019s mitt. Electorally, it\u2019s crimson. Donald Trump won some districts near Escanaba by more than 41%. But at the county fairgrounds, past sheds labeled \u201cBeef\u201d and \u201cSwine\u201d, hundreds of locals on the political left have gathered in the hangar-size 4H Club meeting hall to hear El-Sayed speak.
\u201cWe built this campaign on three simple things. Y\u2019all remember what they are?\u201d El-Sayed stokes the audience, leading them to a call-and-response.
\u201cMoney out of \u2026 \u201d
\u201cPolitics!\u201d
\u201cMoney in your \u2026 \u201d
\u201cPocket!\u201d
\u201cMedicare for \u2026 \u201d
\u201cAll!\u201d
As Americans prepare for historic cuts enacted in the Republican-led \u201cOne Big Beautiful Bill Act\u201d, which is expected to push 17 million people<\/a> from their health insurance plans, El-Sayed appears to have caught a rising tide of interest in Medicare for All.
This election season, Troy Jackson, the Democratic US Senate candidate from Maine, who\u2019s in a dead heat with Republican Susan Collins, said Medicare for All would be \u201cgreat coverage<\/a>\u201d. Angie Nixon, Florida\u2019s Democratic US Senate candidate, has made it a part of her \u201cworking families guarantee<\/a>\u201d. Chris Van Hollen, current US senator for Maryland, added Medicare for All to his platform last December<\/a> after \u201clistening to his constituents\u201d.
El-Sayed\u2019s supporting act in this series of stops is influential Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a longtime Medicare for All proponent and the subject of whispers about a 2028 presidential run. And, according to an October poll<\/a> by the health policy thinktank the Kaiser Family Foundation, two-thirds of Americans support the idea.
Technically, Medicare for All is an insurance reform. Proposals currently before Congress would make the federal government into the nation\u2019s health insurer, a \u201csingle-payer\u201d system more closely aligned with health systems in peer-developed democracies, such as Canada.
Sounds simple. However, in the US, one in every five dollars goes to healthcare. The existing health insurance patchwork fuels profits of world-leading, resource-unlimited corporations<\/a> and powerful local monopolies. Democrats also worry that replacing private insurance, as Medicare for All advocates call for, would provide fodder for Republicans, who have made stoking popular resentment against government into an electoral strategy.
Those enormous barriers have repeatedly relegated Medicare for All to the political hinterlands. Centrist Democrats<\/a> worry that, in a nation where me-but-not-thee politics has reigned for many years, Medicare for All is nothing more than a decades-old tried-and-failed idea.
Then again, in a nation where healthcare prices are the highest in the world<\/a> and climbing<\/a>, when even the insured<\/a> find themselves in medical debt, and where the broad-daylight assassination of an insurance executive elicits catharsis<\/a> and not mourning \u2013 the yearning for change is personal and visceral.
\u201cNot enough doctors, not enough healthcare,\u201d says El-Sayed, who ran both the Detroit and Wayne county health departments, and received a medical degree<\/a> from Columbia University.
A shout from the crowd: \u201cNot enough psychiatrists!\u201d
\u201cNot enough mental healthcare,\u201d El-Sayed answers, tossing out a campaign slogan: \u201cIt shouldn\u2019t be this hard.\u201d
Later, a shout from the same corner: \u201cWhat about our teeth!\u201d
E<\/span>l-Sayed\u2019s campaign comes as the Trump administration enacts the largest federal healthcare cut in the nation\u2019s history \u2013 extracting $1tn from the system primarily by through severe cuts to Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for low-income and disabled people. Medicaid cuts are expected to close hospitals, particularly those in rural outposts<\/a> like Escanaba, and the urban core<\/a>.
At the same time, some of the most popular health policies of recent years \u2013 such as reining in medical debt collections<\/a> \u2013 spring directly from the policy work of Medicare for All advocates. Add to this a counterintuitive reality: almost half of all healthcare today is already paid for by federal, state or local government, according to the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services<\/a>.
\u201cI\u2019ve been at this for a while, and we have dips and peaks in the single-payer movement,\u201d said Dr Stephanie Woolhandler, a professor of public health at the City University of New York, and a decades-long advocate for Medicare for All. Support \u201calways comes back\u201d, she said.
\u201cAnd the reason it always comes back is because the healthcare system has not been fixed \u2013 and it may not be fixable at all without single-payer,\u201d said Woolhandler.
To understand this system, and Republican enmity toward it, it pays to go back a century when the idea of tying health insurance to employment was born of entrepreneurial innovation and historical accident. In 1929, Baylor University hospital offered insurance to cover hospital bills for $6 per year to a group of 1,500 schoolteachers in Dallas. The idea caught on across the country and Blue Cross came to life.
This arrangement was institutionalized during the second world war. Amid government price controls, health insurance was one of the few ways businesses could compete for workers. The federal government made the benefit tax-exempt, as it still is today, according to the foremost history<\/a> on the subject by author Paul Starr.
Since then, Democrats have pushed for reform and expansion \u2013 with their failures to reach universal coverage shaping the contours of the patchwork system that exists today.
In 1965, Democrat Lyndon Johnson passed Medicare, for people older than 65, and its sister program Medicaid, together providing insurance for more than a third<\/a> of Americans today. While the reform was a momentous triumph over segregationist opposition \u2013 Medicare desegregated hospitals \u2013 it came up short against its architects\u2019 vision.
\u201cWe expected Medicare to be a first step toward universal national health insurance,\u201d said Robert Ball, a top official in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, according to an article in Health Affairs<\/a>.
It also created important knock-on effects: it pushed the hospital industry to commercialize in the 1980s, according to Dr Luke Messac, an emergency room doctor at Mass General Brigham, and author of Your Money or Your Life, a history of medical debt. Hospitals, the majority of which are non-profit in the US, argued they could drop the explicit charitable missions many were founded with because Medicare paid patients\u2019 bills.<\/strong> As a result, the hospital industry pushed the IRS to loosen its definition of community benefit, at the same time keeping <\/strong>their nonprofit status and scaling up billing.
This yielded \u201ca lot of middlemen in our system that do not provide a benefit to the public\u201d, said Messac. \u201cOne of the things Medicare for All is intended to do is take some of the power back from those actors.\u201d
\u201cThat poses a huge threat, so the fact that there would be opposition is like the most predictable thing in the world,\u201d he adds. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s a bad idea \u2013 it may mean it\u2019s a good idea.\u201d
S<\/span>ince Johnson\u2019s Medicare bill, the only law to rival it in scope is the Affordable Care Act (ACA), passed in 2010. Better known as Obamacare, a version of the market-based reform was first proposed by scholars<\/a> at the conservative Heritage Foundation. Democrats sought to reach across the aisle; to do so, they developed a bill to subsidize insurance for individuals. But that plan for bipartisan support didn\u2019t work out.
Obamacare was passed on a party-line vote \u2013 one of the first signposts of the new era of polarization. Republicans incessantly targeted it for more than a decade. Today, it is etched it into the minds of conservative voters as the source of all that ills healthcare.
Just ask the pro-Trump protesters outside El-Sayed\u2019s rally in Escanaba.
\u201cWe should almost go back to square one and start analyzing what caused this,\u201d says Bonnie, a 70-year-old Republican in Delta county, who declines to give her last name. \u201cWhen the socialistic ideas started coming in, like Obamacare, that\u2019s what threw everything in a tailspin.\u201d
\u201cI want everything privatized,\u201d says Lisa Pieczyski, a woman in her 60s from near Escanaba, who carries a homemade anti-green-energy sign. \u201cWe\u2019ve mandated too many things under insurance that have made the premiums outrageous.\u201d She adds that she can\u2019t trust the government because \u201cObamacare did all this\u201d.
\u201cI\u2019m middle class, I\u2019ve always been middle class, and what I have done to ensure I have medical insurance is give up something else like a fucking Cadillac and pay for it, all right? OK?\u201d said Delta county\u2019s Republican spokesperson, Michael Glass, 77, who gets insurance through a privatized version of Medicare called Medicare Advantage.
\u201cIt is the individual who should take responsibility for their own healthcare, period.\u201d
A<\/span>s El-Sayed stumps through the UP, his supporters repeat a set of ideas they believe run parallel to Medicare for All: kindness, respect and shared responsibility. In Iron Mountain, he greets an overflow crowd at the local ski lodge \u2013 one of the few public meeting places in this rural town. One \u201clifelong Democrat\u201d says there hasn\u2019t been this much excitement since Bernie Sanders came to town a few years back.
After El-Sayed\u2019s speech \u2013 his condemnations of US support for Israel\u2019s war in Gaza, his calls for cheaper gas, groceries and healthcare, criticisms of Islamophobia \u2013 a woman asks about how to bring people around to Medicare for All.
\u201cI was a registered nurse for 40 years,\u201d she says. \u201cCan you make a video or some kind of something explaining \u2013 some easy way for people to understand how great and easy it\u2019s going to be?\u201d El-Sayed answers \u2013 but it\u2019s Ocasio-Cortez that captures the room.
\u201cRaise your hand if you have waited or delayed getting a treatment or seeing a doctor because you felt you couldn\u2019t afford it,\u201d says Ocasio-Cortez.
Every single person raises a hand.
\u201cRight now, we are waiting weeks, months, years \u2013 to wait until we can afford to see a doctor one day. Healthcare has become a luxury,\u201d says Ocasio-Cortez. \u201cMedicare exists \u2013 we provide a healthcare system for every American above the age of 65.\u201d
Finally, she adds: \u201cThere is this idea that I don\u2019t want to pay for someone else\u2019s thing. First of all, does that mean you don\u2019t want someone else to pay for your care? Does that mean we shouldn\u2019t have Medicare today? Because I\u2019m a young person and I gladly pay, because I want to live in a society where seniors\u201d \u2013 then, she is drowned out by the cheers of people excited to share the cost.
At the end of the one-day, 131-mile trail, El-Sayed is in the gymnasium of Northern Michigan University with enormous pictures of athletes looking out at the audience. A physician assistant who is running for state representative opens the rally and \u2013 all of a sudden \u2013 public health is on the offense.
\u201cAll it took was the closure of my little Planned Parenthood clinic about 18 months ago,\u201d says Anna Aho Rink, a Democratic candidate for Michigan\u2019s 109th US House district, \u201cand me being completely fed up with the system that is not working well for any of us to get me up here today and running for office.\u201d
The rally is at a college, but students are a minority in the audience; there are elderly residents and middle-aged parents with children in tow on a school night.
\u201cYou don\u2019t need a medical degree to recognize the symptoms of a broken economy,\u201d says Ocasio-Cortez as she warms up the crowd. \u201cMichigan, corruption is making this country sick.\u201d
El-Sayed ticks off his public health victories: he got 16,000 kids free reading glasses; used vending machines to distribute Narcan, the overdose reversal medication; tested daycares and preschools for lead in the water, and then remediated dozens.
\u201cYou deserve to have a long, healthy life in the United States of America,\u201d El-Sayed calls.
For many, this politics is in perfect relief to the worldview of the Trump administration \u2013 one where there is not enough to go around, where someone needs to lose, the government must be gutted, loyalty ranks much higher than fact.
The loudest chants of the day fill the gymnasium:
\u201cMoney out of \u2026 \u201d
\u201cPolitics!\u201d
\u201cMoney in your \u2026 \u201d
\u201cPocket!\u201d
\u201cMedicare for \u2026 \u201d
\u201cAll!\u201d<\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Democrats in the midterms are finally backing Medicare for All as a campaign issue amid a rising tide of US supportAbdul El-Sayed, the Democratic US Senate candidate, starts this day on the campaign trail in Escanaba, Michigan, where nearby Wisconsin dairy country spills into dense forests and the sandy shores of Green Bay.This is the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":228929,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-228928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-us","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228928\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/228929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}