It's official - the Affordable Care Act is a success by every one of the law's measures. Healthcare costs are rising at the slowest rate in 50 years; healthcare deficit spending is falling; millions of young Americans can stay on their parent's plans; a further 7 million of those living in poverty are now already covered by the Medicaid expansion, and insurance companies can no longer deny coverage to the 1-in-4 Americans who suffer from a pre-existing condition.

But here's a news flash: the law still sucks. It sucks because capitalists remain in charge of the nation's healthcare.

The ACA is the first healthcare reform bill in more than a half-century, and for that President Obama should be lauded. But the ACA should be seen only as a critical first step towards attaining what every other industrialized nation has: universal healthcare.

Health care is not a consumable good. It's not like the choice between spending disposable income on buying a sofa or a new flat screen television. There is no choice between sickness and health. Medical care is a basic human right, and until we treat it like that, and until we completely destroy the for-profit healthcare industry, America will forever remain a Reagan-utopia: a corporate totalitarian state.

America remains a nation full of healthcare hostages. Americans live in perpetual fear of losing their healthcare. They fear bankruptcy. They fear not being able to afford medications. 7 out of 10 all bankruptcies in this country are caused by unpaid medical bills. The health insurance industry pays doctors and investigators to deny care in order to boost profits. By its very nature, for-profit healthcare means profits are realized by denying healthcare. Each year, 20,000 Americans die because they do not receive adequate care. These insurance corporations hold sick children hostage as they force parents to bankrupt themselves in order to pay their bills.

In the last decade, profits to the top 10 insurance companies has increased 428%. While the average American has become poorer and sicker.

Last week, the International Federation of Health Plans published its annual report, which compares healthcare across OECD countries such as Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Spain, England, Switzerland, and the United States.

The report shows that medical procedures, tests, scans, and presciption medicine still cost far more in the United States than in any other country. An average one-day hospital stay in the U.S. cost $4,293 in 2013, which is nearly 10 times the cost in Spain. Heart bypass surgery cost an average of $75,345 in the U.S., compared with $16,492 in the Netherlands. The average cost of a MRI scan in Switzerland is $138. In the U.S., the same scan costs $1,145.

Medicine is far more expensive for U.S. patients, too. The commonly prescribed pain relief drug Celebrex cost an average of $225 in the U.S., compared with $51 in neighboring Canada.

“The price variations bear no relation to health outcomes; they merely demonstrate the relative ability of providers to profiteer at the expense of patient’s, and in some cases reflect a damaging degree of market failure,” said Tom Sackville, the group’s chief executive.

While the ACA is a step forward, it still leaves a majority of Americans vulnerable to private insurers who will be allowed to jack up premiums. In Massachusetts, one in six people who have mandated insurance thanks to RomneyCare still say they cannot afford care, with tens of thousands of the state’s citizens being evicted from the state program each year thanks to budget cuts.

Both RomneyCare and ObamaCare have nothing to do with socialized medicine or universal healthcare. Both require Americans to buy faulty and expensive products from the vultures of the private insurance industry.

“For someone my age who is making $40,000 a year, you are required to lay out $5,000 for an insurance premium for coverage that covers nothing until you have spent $2,000 out of pocket,” says Dr. David Himmelstein, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a founder of Physicians for a National Health Plan. “You are $7,000 out of pocket before you have any coverage at all. For most people, that means you are already bankrupt before you have insurance. If anything, that has made them worse off. Instead of having that $5,000 to cover some of their medical expenses, they have laid it out in premiums.”

In 2008, then candidate Obama promised universal healthcare, but once in office he found a congress totally beholdened to insurance companies and their lobbyists. Universal non-profit healthcare means the extinction of these medical insurance companies, which means there is no sum of money too large they’re not willing to spend in order to pursuade an all too guliable American public out of considering universal healthcare. It is the hope of progressives that the ACA’s success will prove to an increasing number of Americans that government can and should play a meaningful role in providing healthcare, which, in turn, increases the liklihood of the nation’s healthcare debate returning to considering the public option.

Stupidly, conservatives conflate "free trade" for "freedom." How is one free when one can't afford to pay a corporation the price of a life saving drug or treatment?

“Until we abolish the private, for-profit health insurance industry in this country we are not free. Until we take the for profit motive out of health care, we cannot live the way we want to live,” writes Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges.

Socialized medicine is not a radical idea. We already have it for those above 65 years of age (Medicare), and for those who live in poverty (Medicaid). It's so non-radical that more than 55 percent of Americans want universal, single-payer, not for-profit healthcare for all Americans. Not to mention the fact that 59 percent of doctors are in favor of it, too.

In the years before Congress passed Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, Republicans and the heath insurance industry railed against these healthcare proposals. But President Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Congress overcame their opposition to put into place these two major socialized healthcare programs. In order to attain non-profit healthcare for the rest of the nation, today’s Democrats will need to show the same mettle, and now is the time to renew that fight.

Polls show that while only 10 percent want to keep the ACA as it is, only 29 percent want to repeal the law, which means an overwhelming majority of Americans are in favor of improving our broken for-profit healthcare system. With Medicare’s soaring popularity, the answer is simple: Medicare for all. You know, like every other industrialized nation.

CJ Werleman is the author of Crucifying America, and God Hates You. Hate Him Back. Follow him on twitter: @cjwerleman