>I'm at a loss as to why the US is still dead set to have no meaningful health coverage.
The US isn't a monolith. The majority of the population very much wants meaningful health coverage, but thanks to Supreme Court decisions like Citizens United, corporations are entitled to free political expression under the first Amendment, so they can give unlimited amounts of money to political candidates. This allows uberwealthy individuals to form corporations for the explicit purpose of installing anti-taxation cronies into legislatures at both the state and national level.
Our political process is very corrupt, and it's taken a national emergency (Trump's Presidency) to wake people up. The 2018 midterms demonstrated that far more citizens are paying attention and plan on voting, so hopefully the US goes single payer soon, but it's going to be a brutal political fight.
advertising is the biggest thing 'educating' voters, and usually it's usually something along the lines of here's why <party> <candidate> is bad, vote for me instead. News media is trash and unreliable as they too pander to advertisers or are just spewing nationally distributed talking points.
Bernie who was the most vocal about changes was taken out by Hillary, but no one batted an eye. No one really wants change to the healthcare and pharma industry as it will hurt the entire ecosystem (especially advertising $).
The US isn't a monolith. The majority of the population very much wants meaningful health coverage, but thanks to Supreme Court decisions like Citizens United, corporations are entitled to free political expression under the first Amendment, so they can give unlimited amounts of money to political candidates. This allows uberwealthy individuals to form corporations for the explicit purpose of installing anti-taxation cronies into legislatures at both the state and national level.
Our political process is very corrupt, and it's taken a national emergency (Trump's Presidency) to wake people up. The 2018 midterms demonstrated that far more citizens are paying attention and plan on voting, so hopefully the US goes single payer soon, but it's going to be a brutal political fight.