This is a generally good essay, and Hartmann is great at generating and articulating insights, but I really wish that fellow advocates of universal healthcare would stop prefacing the argument with “In the richest nation in the history of planet Earth” or something like it, as Hartmann did here.

I think that I know why the people who say that say that, but there are a number of related problems with this framing.

The first is that it implies that free healthcare should be a spoil of living in the imperial core, which implies that free healthcare should be a spoil of what we extract from poorer countries. Think about how bad that is.

The second is that it seems to not understand - and, thus, seems unable to confront - that that title of richest country is in some ways built around precisely the fact that we don’t have universal healthcare! It’s precisely the exclusion that pushes the “country” to being so rich in the first place. This is due both to the extraction of labor within the country due to the lack of universal healthcare and to the extraction of resources from other countries made possible in part by the fact that healthcare benefits are a perk of joining the military or working in a military-industrial-complex job that makes that foreign extraction that makes us the richest country in the world possible.

All of that also means that enacting universal healthcare at least has the potential to make us no longer the richest country in the world, whatever that even means. So, it’s bad to hang our argument on this “richest country” framing if we want universal healthcare! After all, this is the real reason that powerful people oppose universal healthcare. Their opposition to universal healthcare has nothing whatsoever to do with fear of a slightly-increased tax bill, and advocates of universal healthcare have to stop taking that bait.