Back in mid-February during the Nevada caucus I was out canvassing for Bernie with a group of people. We were going through some pretty nice suburbs, knocking on doors and trying to get people out for the Primary on Super Tuesday.

Eventually I got to the last house on my route. I knocked on the front door and out stepped a guy in a “Blue Lives Matter” hat. Apparently the last owner had moved, but the guy seemed game to talk anyways. I knew the guy was just leading me on to waste my time, but I was already done with my route and I still had to wait for the other person I was out with, so I figured “hell, why not.”

So we started to talk, and naturally the first thing the guy asked about was healthcare. He kept asking “why should my family and I pay for someone else’s healthcare if they’re an immigrant or don’t work” and so forth.

As it happened, I had just been caught in China during the initial Coronavirus outbreak, and after several weeks of self quarantine the epidemic was still fresh in my mind. So I told him “well, let’s say there’s a highly infectious disease out there. If we don’t have universal insurance that means that guy can’t get tested or treated, so he’ll just stay out there getting sick and infecting other people. That’s not just his problem for him, it’ll puts everyone else around him in danger, including your family.”

“But won’t that be expensive?” he asked.

“Well if that disease because a pandemic, it’d cause huge disruptions that would probably cost us way more than it would have cost to just pay for that guy’s treatment.

Only a truly universal system can prevent that.

“Well what about waiting lists” he argued, “aren’t those a big problem with government healthcare?.”

“Have you ever used private insurance?” I asked, “It’s a mess, you have to wait months for anything to get worked out, then your coverage is based on some arbitrary decision someone makes because nobody can figure out any of it. You may find out months later you’re getting charged thousands of dollars for essentially nothing.”

“But it’s still like that with Obamacare”

“Yes, and Obama made a big mistake by trying to work through the complex, inefficient private system, so now most people just see it as a big confusing thing thing they hate. Medicare for All doesn’t have that problem, it’s a simple straight forward system which makes getting treatment easy for everyone.”

“Yeah, but look at the VA” he said, “It’s a mess”

“It’s a mess largely because of funding cuts, under staffing and privatization. The answer there is to shore up the VA, not tear it up through privatization.”

“Okay,” he said, “but won’t all this stifle innovation?”

“There’s hardly any innovation as is” I answered, “drug companies mostly just research minor variations on profitable drugs, like anti-cholesterol medication. On the other hand, antivirals and vaccines are usually pretty unprofitable, so they rely heavily on government funding. And even when private companies do want to make them, they charge exorbitant prices for them. So you either can’t get them, or you can’t afford them. So where does that get you?”

“Okay,” he said, “but you can’t apply this logic to everything. What about housing? Why should I pay to put someone in government housing when I’m having trouble paying for my mortgage?”

“Well, besides basic empathy, having a large homeless population often costs than you’d pay if you just put them up somewhere. Like, to go back to the disease thing, how do you quarantine people when they’re getting evicted from their homes? How do they stay healthy and practice basic hygiene if their water is getting shut off?”

And it went like this for a while. Eventually we got to immigration and he threw me off his property after he tried to argue Sweden had no immigrants, and if they did they’d all be rapists. Again, I was kind of expectIng that, the guy was never arguing in good faith and wasn’t going to be convinced of anything no matter how tactful I was.

But the seeds were planted.

Now, Three Weeks Later…

… we’re in the midsts of a giant pandemic that threatens to kill hundreds of thousands of people because the feudal private insurance system can’t figure out if people should be covered for treatment or charged thousands of dollars. The disease is spreading largely because people can’t afford to take sick leave or they’re too scared they might get fired. Capitalism is exploding because the private healthcare system can’t handle the situation, and neither can the government who’s own public health system has been hollowed out in the interest of budget cuts and privatization. Roughly 11 trillion dollars has disappeared in less than a month as the stock market crashed, far more than Medicare for All could ever have cost, while a $1.5 trillion dollar bailout to investors evaporated in seconds because a system that only looks after people at the top can’t address things like this that mostly affect poor people.

This is a crisis that exposes all the vulnerabilities of not only our private healthcare system, but also financial capitalism in general and the political system that serves it. It’s exactly the thing that Bernie Sanders has built his entire campaign, nay, career warning us about. He argued consistently for measures like Medicare for All and meaningful economic reform that would have prevented it, even as his opponents, especially Joe Biden, threw out bad faith argument after bad faith argument about how we can’t afford it or how it’s a bridge to far and so on. Meanwhile, their whole idea that we can get ‘things done’ by parring down our requests turned out to be totally wrong, as Republicans have time and time again refused to implement even the most modest measures to address the situation. Bernie has been 100% right on this, and his critics have been 100% wrong. Even the most delusional partisan should be able to see that.

So now my mind is going back to that guy I was arguing with a few weeks back. I wonder what he’s making of this. In all likelihood he’s still in denial about the growing crisis, but as it gets more and more serious cracks must be starting to break through. He’s going to start to get worried about his kids and parents. He’s going to start to wonder what he’d have to deal with if one if one of them gets sick. He’ll wonder who might get them sick, where, and why. He’ll wonder what closing the borders would actually accomplish when the virus is already inside the country. Maybe he’ll start to wonder if it really better to just give everyone healthcare. Maybe he’s seeing his savings getting destroyed and thinking, “gee, maybe it would be cheaper if we’d just paid for tests and treatment for everyone right off the bat.” Maybe all the seeds of all the arguments I was giving that guy are starting to germinate and he’s realizing “huh, maybe all that made sense after all.”

And if that guy can get it, anyone can get it.