 even prior to the pandemic, healthcare insecurity in America was a gigantic issue. But obviously, the pandemic made matters worse because if we tie healthcare in this country to our employers and millions and millions of Americans lose their jobs as a result of the pandemic, obviously, that's going to further exacerbate the crisis. But now we're learning specifically how many Americans can't actually afford quality healthcare. And we're not talking about whether or not they can afford a medical emergency because a lot of Americans can't afford to bear the cost of a medical emergency. A new poll just asks them simply, can you afford quality healthcare if you need it? And 18% of Americans say that they cannot. So as Jake Johnson of Common Dreams reports, a new study released Wednesday morning shows that nearly 50 million Americans would be unable to afford quality healthcare should the need for treatment suddenly arise, a finding seen as further evidence of the immorality of a for-profit insurance system that grants or denies coverage based on a person's ability to pay. People can't afford their goddamn healthcare, Tim Faust, a proponent of single-payer healthcare tweeted in response to the new report. Families spend less on food so they can make insurance payments. This problem is felt by all but concentrated among poor people and black people. The American Model of Health Reform throwing money at private insurers cannot solve it. The rot is pervasive and it runs deep, Faust added. People who cannot afford healthcare just don't get healthcare. Wealthy men get to live 15 years longer than poor men. We have condemned poor children to die from things which do not kill rich children. In America, sickness makes you poor, poorness makes you sick, then you die. According to the report by Gallup and West Health, 18% of U.S. adults around 46 million people say that if they needed access to quality healthcare today, they would not be able to cover the costs. The same percentage of adults report that amid a deadly pandemic, someone in their household has opted to skip needed care over the past year due to inability to pay. The chances of any given household suffering from this form of health insecurity are inversely related to annual household income with 35% of respondents from low-income households, those earning under 24,000 per year, reporting forgoing care in the prior 12 months, Gallup's Dan Witter's notes in the summary of the study's findings, that is five times the rate reported by those from high-income households, 7%, defined as earning at least $180,000 per year. And need I remind you that this is occurring in the richest country on the planet. And before the pandemic, we learned, according to a study conducted by the University of Florida and University of Maryland, that if we actually adopted Medicare for All, that wouldn't just save $450 billion every single year, but it would actually save 68,000 lives every single year. So this is a crisis. And for whatever reason, it's not being treated like the crisis that it is. And I'm sorry, I don't care that Joe Biden threatened to veto Medicare for All. I don't care that the current political climate in America isn't necessarily conducive to Medicare for All being successful. I don't care. That doesn't mean that we stop pushing for what's right, because it's not necessarily possible in the short term. If you would have told civil rights activists in the 60s or gay rights activists in the late 70s and early 80s, that they shouldn't be pushing for their civil rights, because the current political climate wasn't necessarily accepting of them, they would have rejected that because you don't fight for what's possible. You fight for what's right. So even if it's not possible currently, that doesn't mean that we don't fight for it. That doesn't mean that we don't currently push the envelope. The answer is clear. It's Medicare for All. And there's a lot of reasons why we aren't making any progress towards this, in spite of it being incredibly popular, according to public opinion polls. It's because we have a Democratic Party that has been bought and paid for by the health insurance industry. In fact, during the Democratic Party primaries in 2020, the health insurance industry actually bet everything on Joe Biden to save them from the momentum of Medicare for All and Bernie Sanders, who was a proponent of Medicare for All. And now that Joe Biden is in power, we're expected to just kind of roll over and die when in actuality, that's not going to happen. Grassroots activists are not going to stop fighting for Medicare for All. We're not going to stop advocating for Medicare for All because this is the objectively correct policy that would save lives and money. Now I care more about lives, but if you care about money, whatever argument you want to make a small business tax credit, I don't care how you sell it, but the answer is very clearly Medicare for All. And part of the issue here is that the mainstream media has completely failed us. They failed us. They're not treating this like the crisis that it is. This is a public health emergency. 68,000 Americans dying every single year because they don't have healthcare. That is a crisis. How are we not talking about that? How are mainstream news pundits not pressing every single politician, Democrat and Republican, what they're going to do to save the 68,000 people who are dying every single year? And now that number is probably a lot higher. And when you look at this study, I'm assuming that if you ask them a bit more questions, the number of people who can't afford healthcare would be higher because you have a lot of folks who pay for healthcare. They have health insurance. So technically, they believe that they're protected, but in actuality, they don't realize that there are additional costs and co-pays and their insurance doesn't cover everything. So if they were educated and they knew about the healthcare that they would receive and how much it would cost, I think that the number would actually be higher and more people would say, I can't afford my healthcare. So I'm sick and tired of hearing about healthcare insecurity in America. I'm sick and tired of hearing about all of these studies, study after study after study, showing how cost efficient and effective Medicare for all will be. We're beyond that. We're beyond the selling and the marketing of Medicare for all. Now is the time for action. Now is the time to fight. And nobody is going to realize how important this issue is if people with power and influence don't actually elevate the salience of this issue. So I need members of Congress to talk about this issue, speak about the health insecurity issue in America like the public health crisis that it is. I'm talking about members of the squad, even Bernie Sanders. And there's so many issues that affect us. It's difficult to really disproportionately focus on any one issue. But when 60,000 American lives are being lost every single year, probably now more after the pandemic, that is something that is of the utmost concern or should be of the utmost concern and priority to everyone. So there's not going to be a sense of urgency if the media politicians and influencers don't elevate the salience of this issue. The answer is Medicare for all. Now anyone who doesn't support it, Joe Biden, Democrats, Republicans, they're part of the problem. They are the enemies and they must be exposed and thoroughly defeated. There's absolutely no excuse for a politician to not support and unequivocally embrace policies like Medicare for all before the pandemic. But after the pandemic and during the pandemic, if you don't support Medicare for all, you're not just heartless. I actually think you're a lunatic. You're a psychopath. If you don't support the policy, that is objectively going to save lives. And it's not a matter of cost. It's something that we can afford easily because overall net healthcare spending in America will go down. It's a matter of actually doing what's right and going to war with health insurance companies that fund the Democratic Party. But we know why they don't want to do it. So we have to keep pushing, keep fighting, keep organizing. And it's not going to be easy, but just because it's not going to be easy doesn't necessarily mean that we shouldn't do it. It might be seemingly impossible, but there were other things that were impossible in America that we were able to accomplish. It's just a matter of we keep fighting and we don't get discouraged because there are going to be many obstacles that pop up, many defeats along the way. But that doesn't mean that we've lost on this issue. We just have to make sure that people know how bad the situation is and we treat it with the urgency it requires.