G. Keenan wrote:
My single issue is universal healthcare. That one issue has so much potential to transform our society for the better. Start with the health benefits to individuals and communities of better primary care, better mental health care, better access to specialty care, etc. Think of the stress it removes from everyone's life to not worry about healthcare like we do. Imagine not having to organize your work life around getting/affording health insurance. Imagine how much more freedom and independence people would have knowing that their healthcare needs are covered as a collective project of society.
Beyond all that, a successful universal healthcare system could boost civic engagement. If our healthcare is a collective project we all buy into it gives everyone more skin the game, more reason to care about what govt. does and how it spends money. Should we start a war with Iran, or finance our own healthcare? Should we cut taxes for billionaires every few years, or finance healthcare? If it works, it will belie the Republican talking points that govt. is hopeless, govt. can never do anything right, govt. intervention in any aspect of the private sector is bad, etc. A shift in that paradigm can open up possibilities for collective thinking towards other big problems like climate, infrastructure, violence, etc.
It would not be a panacea, but by and large, the countries that have universal healthcare love their systems and would not trade them for ours in a million years. And while they have their divisions over many of the same issues we do, their societies are not still litigating the fundamental questions of government's role in society. It is simply expected that govt. should be providing its citizenry with certain basic protections. Here we cannot even get to that point because we're still arguing over who "deserves" what.
I could be convinced to go this route too. Once Medicare for All is paying for all/most health care, we can start looking at all the things that are costing us too much. For example: "Medicare for All is paying $X billion every year to take care of gunshot wounds." We can use that to go after gun control. Another one: "Medicare for All is paying $X billion to care for people who are sick or got cancer from pollution." We can use that to go after polluters. Or maybe even: "Medicare for All is paying $X billion to treat workplace injuries." We can use that to go after employers that are making jobs too dangerous. Keep in mind that our society is already paying for all these massive problems in other ways right now, but since it is put on private insurance who pass the costs to their customers, all the real costs of these problems are obscured. Medicare for All would put all those costs in one place and make it much clearer how much these problems are costing us, and it would also make it "fiscally conservative" to try to address these problems (not to mention the right thing to do).
This is one reason I have not given up hope. All these things are so intertwined that if we ever even get 1 of these things done, I think it will have a ripple effect and improve other things that you may not have guessed. But we can't stop there.
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