Those who read these columns or pay attention to civic affairs know the Green Party and I are longtime advocates of single-payer healthcare (i.e. Medicare for all), a major plank in my 2008 and 2010 congressional platforms. If Democrats or Republicans actually cared about healthcare, we would have had single-payer decades ago. Otto von Bismarck gave German citizens universal healthcare in the late 19th century. Richard Nixon would have done so for us but for Ted Kennedy’s obstructionism.

Polls now suggest Medicare for all has 60 percent public support. All medically necessary services would be covered: doctor, hospital, preventive and long-term care, mental and reproductive health, dental, vision, prescription drug and medical supply costs. We’d fund it with modest Medicare taxes we already pay and savings from replacing today’s inefficient, profit-oriented care with a single streamlined, not-for-profit, public payer system. Premiums, co-pays, deductibles and other financial barriers would be gone. Free choice of doctors and hospitals would remain. All but the wealthiest households would save money.

Given this popular support, why haven’t political power brokers like Nancy Pelosi considered it, claiming instead constituencies aren’t ready for a single-payer system? That’s because Pelosi’s “constituency” is less about people than profits of insurance and pharmaceutical firms Medicare for all will put at risk. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Pelosi gets more money from health services than any other industry, twice that donated by public sector unions and investment firms combined.

As for Pelosi's own healthcare coverage, like other members of Congress, veterans and Medicare recipients, it’s single-payer. Pelosi isn’t about to extend those privileges to you, however. That would jeopardize political contributions from private insurers. With healthcare, as other issues, major parties are less concerned with lives and liberties of vulnerable citizens than power retention assured by their wealthy contributors.

The Senate’s recent “healthcare” bill is Congress’ latest attempt to redistribute wealth from poor and middle class families to the rich. By gutting healthcare to 23 million working-class Americans, US taxpayers making $200,000 or more annually will get $346 billion in tax cuts. That’s the largest single transfer of wealth to the rich in our nation’s history. Already saddled by high deductibles, co-pays and limited coverage, older folks, not yet eligible for Medicare, could pay as much as 16.2 percent of their income on premiums. And pre-existing conditions will be targeted for lesser coverage at unaffordable prices. Though 1 in 5 Americans suffer a disability, the Senate bill proposes even harsher cuts to Medicaid than the House, upwards of $400 billion. States refusing to make up the difference will relegate their poor, disabled and elderly to an ice flow of neglect. As Medicaid shrinks, psychiatric care and opioid abuse will worsen as well.

By keeping heath care a for-profit industry and private insurers its gatekeepers, the Affordable Care Act was doomed from the start. But for seven years, motivated by politics instead of ethics, nothing was crafted to replace it. Now that the tree is falling the monkeys have scattered, and anything less than Medicare for all will be a shameful replacement indeed.

Scott Deshefy is two-time Green Party congressional candidate. E-mail at baronarad11@gmail.com.