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Back in the bad old days of the Big Pharma COVID-19 get rich quick scam, Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart wanted a Covid test. If he weren’t a congressman, he would have had to get a note from his doctor for which he would be billed the equivalent of an office visit, call a testing site to make an appointment, drive to the site and wait in his car for (if he’s lucky) about two hours. Days or weeks later, he would get his results, provided he hadn‘t already died. Diaz-Balart merely walked down the Capitol hallway to a two-room suite of offices with the innocuous title Office of the Attending Physician (OAP). He was waited on immediately, the test was administered and in minutes, he learned he was positive. His total cost? Zero.
[2021 as the Big Pharma-induced COVID frenzy was gathering momentum]

He’s co-chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and a beneficiary of single payer healthcare, two good reasons for Rep. Diaz-Balart to champion Medicare-for-all. Instead, he’s a vocal opponent of what he labels “socialized medicine” (aka Medicare for All) — “The Members of this Conference [Hispanic Caucus] … will not support a bill that is being forced down America’s throat and that will take America down the path to bankruptcy.” You will note there are exceptions to every rule a bloviating congress person lays down. In Diaz-Balart’s case, the exception is — you guessed it — himself and his BFFs.

Rep. Diaz-Balart, along with every member of Congress, is the recipient of single payer government health insurance. Guess what? It’s not socialized medicine when Congress has it. The Office of the Attending Physician (OAP) is a full-blown hospital with branches all over Capitol Hill run by dozens of navy doctors, nurses and technicians. It has been described by a former OAP staffer as “the best healthcare on the planet.”

Not surprisingly Rep Diaz-Balert is not the only member of Congress whose hypocrisy is killing Americans. A far bigger fish, Nancy Pelosi [net worth $248 million] a Democrat who should know better but doesn’t, the first woman speaker of the House and the most powerful woman in the U.S. has a “simple” solution for the millions of Americans whose children don’t have enough to eat, whose bills, including rent, go unpaid, stuck in miles-long lines for free food or stuck in a minimum wage job. It’s not Medicare-for-All. Instead, the Former Speaker and her Republican successor, along with former President Barack Obama are singing the praises of Obamacare (named after its creator) —overpriced crappy health insurance which wouldn’t help them even if they weren’t broke. Average price of an Obamacare plan in 2024? $6,000 per year with deductibles (amount you have to fork over before your insurance kicks in ranging from $5,000-$8,000 per year). Amount each Congress person has to pay for “the best healthcare on the planet?” $648 per year. Zero deductibles. It’s pretty cushy all-inclusive medical care that includes coronavirus testing, flu vaccines, lab work, physicals, Xrays, and referrals to specialists. What’s more for the cheapest members non-payment doesn’t stop them from enjoying the service. Try that one out on your insurance company.

The OAP may be virtually free to members of Congress but someone has to pay the $4.9 million price tag (2025). Look in the mirror. You and every other tax payer is on the hook for the free ride given to Congress.

This year it was of $4.9 million. In 2020 when pandemic hysteria forced country-wide closures, 22.5 million Americans lost their jobs and their healthcare. In response Congress passed the CARES Act, a nothing burger for people who most needed relief but a boon for Congress as they furtively tucked into the budget bill a $400,000 subsidy to OPA.

Members of Congress live on an entirely different planet from the rest of us. The legislators we send to Congress generally wind up as millionaires if they’re not when they get there. The vast majority of both the Senate and House of Representatives has a net worth exceeding $1 million. Only 18% of the 132.6 million American households (2024-25) are worth one million or more. There’s no single payer concierge-level healthcare plan for them.

Typically, politicians do a lot of handwringing when the topic of single payer health insurance is raised as an alternative to employer-provided health insurance — “[with Medicare-for-all] we will no longer have private insurance as we know it. And that means that 149 million Americans will no longer be able to have their current insurance…I think it’s a bad idea.”

What’s so bad about employer-provided healthcare? Almost everything. For openers in a system, unique in the developed world, where healthcare is tied to employment, workers must toe the line or risk not only their jobs but their healthcare. Even with employers paying some of the cost (less each year), health insurance company greed has taken a larger and larger chunk out of workers’ paychecks. Over the last decade, employees’ share of premiums has risen by 71%. (Kaiser Family Foundation). Workers’ wages have not kept up. Real wages (after accounting for inflation) have been stagnant for the last four decades. The overall effect —while employees’ wages remain static, they are constantly paying out more for their health insurance. At the same time, insurance companies are flush with profits.

The inequality underlying U.S. healthcare is stunning— a single payer virtually free healthcare delivery system for elected representatives and a free-market, profit-oriented health industry boondoggle enriching healthcare oligarchs for the rest of us. The one paid for by American taxpayers but not offered to them is a luxurious on-call service, the other, employer-provided healthcare, fails to fulfill even modest healthcare needs. Obamacare, the third tier of the failed U.S. healthcare system, is a hodgepodge of unaffordable costs and substandard care. You don’t have to imagine a situation where the people are forced to pay for the most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet reap little benefit. You’re living it. The present healthcare system based on private profiteering cost American taxpayers $5.2 trillion (estimated) in 2024. Don’t forget the U.S. spends more on health care than any other country yet still ranks last among wealthy nations in overall performance, particularly in access to care and health outcomes. Is it any surprise that the American people face the shortest life expectancies in the developed world?

Bottom line: The U.S. healthcare system is a miserable failure and a total disgrace. It’s time to pick up a broom and sweep out the phonies (aka elected officials) who keep the present healthcare system chugging along and then elect men and women who will fight to make healthcare in the U.S. a human right. But like Diogenes, searching for an honest man (or woman) with a torch in broad daylight, our quest for integrity in a world of pretense is probably doomed.

Healthcare as a human right not a privilege is cherished by people lucky enough to live in almost every advanced country on the planet.  Not so lucky are the people who live in the richest, most powerful country in the world where healthcare is a privilege not a right. As of 2024, 8% of Americans (26 million) have no medical insurance and find the doors to medical providers closed to them. They are not the only victims of this brutal privatized, for-profit health uncaring system. One-third of Americans have health insurance, but are woefully underinsured. Unable to afford “premium” plans, they are stuck with bargain basement plans that offer only a modicum of benefits but still include larcenous premiums, high deductibles (often $10,000 or more) and over-the-top co-pays. How inadequate is a healthcare system when 50% of its intended beneficiaries finds it “difficult to afford healthcare” [Kaiser Family Foundation]?

Medical debt is the leading cause of all bankruptcies in the US. Compare that to other wealthy nations where medical bankruptcies are rare to non-existent. In the U.K. only 8.2% of bankruptcies are due to medical debt [World Population Review, 2025]

You may wonder why the U.S. is the only wealthy country where people can go bankrupt trying to save their lives. Without national “single payer” healthcare, Americans have to pay whatever the chiselers who run the privatized system demand. In a single payer system, the government finances healthcare through taxes.

In this wildly overpriced wasteland, private equity outlaws and financial terrorists have transformed what used to be the “healing profession” into private fiefdoms where Americans’ hard-earned dollars feather the nests of the gangsters who run them. In 2024, Andrew Witty, CEO of United Healthcare, the largest health insurance company in the U.S., took home the munificent compensation of $26,339,215. Guess whose pocket it came out of?  Yours. He is part of a pantheon of wildly overcompensated healthcare hooligans whose personal fortunes are baked into the U.S. $5 trillion “healthcare” bill.

What does the U.S. consumer receive for $5 trillion? Are they healthier than other people? Is privatized healthcare cheaper? No on both counts, Americans are stuck with poorer health outcomes, like lower life expectancy, the highest death rate for avoidable and treatable conditions, the highest maternal and infant mortality rates and among the highest suicide rate in the developed world. Americans are dangerously overweight (twice the recommended average) and have the highest rate of chronic conditions. During the pandemic, with only 4% of the world’s population, 1.2 million Americans died, more than in any other country. By comparison, India, the most populous country in the world (1.46 billion people) had 533,600 deaths—about half the number in the U.S. The conclusion is inescapable: the U.S. pays the most but fares the worst.

“We don’t consume a lot more health care than other countries.” We just pay a lot more for each thing.” [Dr. Atul Grover, executive director of the nonprofit AAMC Research and Action Institute] The invasion of private equity, over $1 trillion in investments since 2015, has resulted in sky rocketing costs accompanied by a decline in quality, “[Private equity firms] seek returns on their investment [in healthcare] as high as possible as quickly as possible, then rush to sell off that investment and go on to their next conquest.” [Professor John McDonough, Harvard School of Medicine]

As the U.S. population began to age and the average American got sicker and sicker, greedy investors quickly began to see a new market promising quick and easy profits. They began scooping up physician practices (5,779 in 2023 up from 816 in 2012), one-third of emergency rooms and 460 hospitals (22% of for-profit hospitals). They also have a significant presence in nursing homes, even fertility clinics.

When profit becomes part of every medical decision whether it’s ordering expensive, often unnecessary, tests and procedures, or prescribing expensive medications when less expensive options are available, it’s the patient who suffers. One study found that Medicare patients at private equity-owned hospitals suffered a 25% increase in hospital-acquired complications compared to Medicare patients at hospitals not owned by private equity. [Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) December 26, 2023]. Other studies have found that generally healthcare quality declines and costs skyrocket when private equity takes over.

Isn’t a failing health care system the ultimate life and death issue that calls for elected officials to step up to the plate? Apparently not when major reforms like single payer healthcare would be vehemently opposed by their real constituency, the men and women who control U.S. healthcare through powerful lobbies, major corporations and gigantic financial interests. After all, why should congress care about your health need when unlike you, being in congress entitles them to single payer healthcare? As their real concern is keeping their jobs, business as usual means getting a slice of the $23 million “healthcare professionals” throw into their campaign pots annually and the $16 million that big pharma chips in. Isn’t that how pay-to-play politics works in banana republics?

If congress is unwilling to go against the demands of its paymasters what about the sitting president? In 2010 when President Obama introduced a reworked version of a tired old Republican healthcare proposal and renamed it The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), he was particularly eloquent with his lying falsehoods—“It’s [Obamacare]…[that’s] going to make sure that nobody…loses everything…because they’re sick.”  Consider: over two-thirds of bankruptcies are due to astronomical medical bills. As to the assertion that “[Obamacare] makes quality, affordable healthcare not a privilege but a right.” [Statement on whitehouse.gov], at least 75% of those filing for medical bankruptcy had health insurance.

It gets worse. When Joe Biden became president in 2020, he said the quiet part out loud: he would veto Medicare-for-all if it ever came to his desk.

What’s the moral of this saga? The Democratic party even its progressive wing will never grow a backbone stiff enough to go up against wealthy and powerful elites that oppose single-payer healthcare. Until and unless America joins the rest of the developed world with a national healthcare system, Americans will continue to be the sickest people on the planet.

You may be stuck in an expensive and underperforming privatized health care system but Congress and the President have Medicare-for-all. Looking to learn more? Check out Congress has Single Payer Health Insurance —Why Don’t You?

It may not have been the beginning of the betrayal of the American empire’s promises to bring the “blessings” of American democracy to everyone on earth, but technological advances in media greatly expanded the opportunities for people everywhere to see what these “blessings” really amount to. In most cases chaos and upheaval and a total destruction of people’s lives and livelihoods.

August, 1968 proved to be the first eye-opener for millions of people around the world parked in front of their TV sets as crowds of mostly young people gathered outside the site of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois venting their frustration and rage about a war that only the military industrial complex and their supporters could love (including at the outset most of Congress and President Johnson). The draft age men in the crowd knew the stakes were high. “War is young men dying and old men talking.” [attributed to President Franklin Roosevelt].  As they were marching, the Chicago Police, clad in riot gear, some on horseback attacked them. Media coverage made sure the whole world saw that the grand American experiment of peace, fraternity and democracy was imploding in front of their eyes.

U.S. leaders, along with most of the worlds people, have known for over half a century what happens after the U.S. has finished doling out its peculiarly horrific “blessings” on the countries it targets. The destruction of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos was an American—led genocide. They did it again in 1999 wiping Yugoslavia off the map.

Was the world watching? Hard not to. But sixty years ago, even twenty-five years ago, the U.S. was the most powerful country on earth, the sole hegemon in a unipolar world. People shrugged their collective shoulders and moved on.

That changed as the American empire took a dive off its pedestal. As the 21^st century dawned, the decline of the American empire and its dreams of ruling the world began crumbling. In 2001 and 2003, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ended with the U.S. making a beeline for the exits, in 2008 an economic collapse, in 2011 the U.S. led-destruction of Libya and murder of its leader (which even then-President Obama described as a “shit show”).

As the world watched in “shock and awe,” the U.S. continued its rampage. “In 2014 the US backed an uprising…against the legitimately elected Ukrainian government…[The New York Times 5/31/2022]

The chickens came home to roost in this latest example of U.S. meddling in another nation’s affairs. In 2022 Russia launched its “special military operation” against Ukraine with the U.S in Ukraine’s corner providing money ($183 billion) weapons and intelligence. Then-President Biden promised to turn “the ruble into rubble” with sanctions while his CIA buddies blew up the Nord Stream pipeline. Another war it couldn’t win. A different kind of war as Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared —“And frankly it’s a proxy war between nuclear powers, the United States helping Ukraine and Russia.”

Was the world watching? It’s hard to believe it wasn’t. Particularly Germans, whose home energy bills skyrocketed and industries withered as it made do without cheap Russian gas. Instead Germany was forced to depend on American suppliers at a 50% markup.

What else does a dying empire do? Wage economic war against what it perceives as its adversaries. In this case, the entire world. Currently 2.6 billion people (one-third of the world’s population) are under U.S. sanctions. Even The Washington Post usually in lock step with Washinton’s political leaders cried foul — “[In 2024, the United States imposed] three times as many sanctions as any other country…targeting a third of all nations with some kind of financial penalty on people, properties or organizations.” [“How 4 U.S. Presidents Unleashed Economic Warfare Across the Globe” The Washington Post]

It’s a sure bet people in the affected countries were watching.

After 20 months the world has finally woken up to decry the barbarity of the Israelis as they conduct a genocide in Gaza with their U.S. BFF’s. Together they have caused the deaths of at least 54,000 Palestinians, one-third of them children. With the latest 2-1/2-month blockade of Gaza and the resumption of bombing raids, starvation stalks the land and that total is bound to rise.

It may have taken too long but the world’s spot light is trained on the carnage. As the U.S. clings to Israel, becoming the only nation in the United Nations Security Council to vote against a cease fire resolution, thus killing it, the rest of the world has seen enough and moves away.

No longer the world’s cop, diplomatically isolated, the U.S. has seen its power diminished, its moral standing corrupted and its ability to shape the world according to its own inclinations gone. Burdened with debt, haunted by memories of faded glory, like all declining empires, it turns to its trillion-dollar military for a resurgence. Ask the Afghans, the Iraqis, the Somalis, the Libyans, the Houthis how well that worked out.

“The military-industrial complex has become so powerful…that it dominates the government…We [the U.S.] would spend millions of dollars arming…the corrupt dictators… of this world with weapons they could turn against their own people because such rulers were safe, they were anti-communist and that was the only political gauge that mattered. [Fred J. Cook & Bertrand Russell, The Warfare State, 1962)

It was true six decades ago and it’s true today. The world is indeed watching and America grows more isolated every day. Will it wake up in time?