because they gotta spend a literal trillion a year to kill brown people worldwide instead.

Too many people with too much power are making too much money, so they all work together to keep the cash cow going. It’s become pretty clear that’s what the US has reduced itself to at this point. It’s kinda nakedly obvious this whole thing is a giant fucking Ponzi scheme at this point - I’m fairly certain I’m never getting the social security I’ve payed into for my whole career.

Because our sclerotic legislature and campaign finance systems ensure that every single function of “democratic” society is fully and totally captured by the interests of capital

It would take a lot of pressure off of people to grind themselves down for profits as well as demonstrate that a government can actually take care of people, two precedents the capitalist class absolutely refuses to set.

Seriously? Because that’s money flowing in the “wrong” direction, that is away from billionaires’ pockets.

I feel like we Marxists have explained why hundreds of times in dozens of ways already.

Helps keep people enlisting when the only way they can have their basic needs met is to sign up with the evil empire.

The people essentially have been demanding it. As several others have mentioned in this thread, 70-80% of the public supports universal healthcare in some form. For the nitty-gritty, basically 50 years ago and earlier, extremely wealthy people realised that their preferred policies weren’t especially popular with the general public. They identified that their main issue was that what they had was money, not people. So they embarked on a decades long quest to give money the same (or greater) political power as individuals, culminating in the Citizen’s United Supreme Court case. I bring this up because it essentially means that the People demanding it doesn’t matter, because while there may be a couple hundred million people asking for it, there’s a couple hundred billion dollars asking to never do it. It’s gotten so bad that there’s a kind of perverse, Stockholm Syndrome effect starting to happen to. In 2016 there was a big dust-up during the Democratic Primary where the Culinary Union in Las Vegas/Nevada didn’t want to endorse Bernie Sanders, the most pro-Union candidate in decades, essentially because medicare-for-all would remove health insurance as a bargaining chip

The companies make too much money, and the same companies dictate policy to the government.

The USA is not a democracy.

People can demand it, but that isn’t how we could ever get it. The privatized healthcare system makes too much money and the left in the US Empire is only recently beginning to recover from the Red Scare and systematic dismantling by the state in the 20th century.

Everybody has to want it, including majority of politicians in power.