In his State of the Union address tonight, 1 Mar 2022, Joe Biden stayed consistent with his campaign pledge to bury universal healthcare, throwing 30 million uninsured Americans under the bus along with at least 40 million under-insured.
In tonight’s speech Biden used the simplest of expedients: silence. Amid all the easy applause lines, the leader of the world’s wealthiest nation whispered not a word about healthcare as a human right…
…Nor a word about addressing America’s shameful performance contrasted with peer nations, a gap that is growing. Average life expectancy in comparable nations has now risen to 82 years. Here in the US, you’ll die 5 years younger, on average, at 77. And if you’re Black? Knock off another 5 years of precious life.
Apparently the President wasn’t keen to talk about such glaring disparities. Why? Likely because as a straight-up corporatist, Biden had no solution he was willing to offer — like Medicare for All: everyone in, no one left out — which, by the way, would boost American prosperity with cost savings of as much as $650 billion a year or more. That’s according to the Congressional Budget Office which, by the way, is still headed by an economist appointed by Trump.
Further, that’s net cost savings after fully covering every man, woman and child in America, cradle to grave. It equates to cost savings of $6.5 trillion per decade, far more than the cost of Biden’s entire Build Back Better plan vetoed by ‘President Manchin,’ ostensibly due to cost.
In his speech, Biden might also have mentioned that just days ago the CBO published another report, this one laying out far-reaching positive economic impacts if Congress were to enact single-payer universal healthcare.
Instead, among Biden’s carefully crafted applause lines, we got silence on universal healthcare. This silence gave not even a glimmer of hope to millions of uninsured and under-insured Americans — all still waiting for comprehensive healthcare as a human right.
It’s emblematic of why Democratic voters show little enthusiasm in 2022, at least so far. I can’t blame them.