CHICAGO—Stressing democracy, affordability, and comprehensive coverage, more than 300 organizations—including unions, locals, and union-affiliated organizations—relaunched the drive for single-payer government-run Medicare For All. In addition to seeing it as a fix to healthcare, they see it as a major step in fixing an economy that President Trump has been rapidly ruining.
It is the cost of healthcare that fuels much of the affordability crisis felt by Americans, and it is the present system of giving inordinate power to healthcare corporations and the lawmakers they control that fuels much of the attacks underway on democracy. Lawmakers beholden to those companies are the very same ones busy undermining democracy in many ways, including and especially by attacking and limiting the right to vote.
When it comes to the economy, both Medicare for All advocates and the lawmakers who oppose it understand well that healthcare is the second biggest sector of the economy, with perhaps Wall Street being the only one larger. Right-wing lawmakers get much of their financial support from companies in the health industry determined to maintain that position.
The objective of Medicare for All advocates, according to the letter the Chicago-based Physicians for a National Health Program (PHNP) circulated, is to build a mass movement to force politicians to establish single-payer and get rid of the rapacious and care-denying insurers in 2029.
The campaign organizers figure it will take two election cycles, now and 2028, to create the correct political conditions to push single-payer through. It will take that long to overcome what is now a hostile Congress, past a financially loaded health-care complex full of oligopolies–and elect a new president succeeding GOPer Donald Trump.
“Our democracy is struggling,” began Dt. Diljeet Singh, the successor to Dr. Quentin Young of Chicago as president of the Physicians for a National Health Program. “We need an agenda working-class people and everyday Americans can rally behind. Without one, far-right, fascist politicians are filling that void.
“The fascist agenda redirects people’s rightful anger at our system’s failures to unjustly place blame on immigrants, low-income people, and people of color…Failing to provide transformational policies and hope to the working class allowed fascism to rise and hold on to power.
“It’s time to challenge the corrupt CEOs who profit off despair. To show people real solutions that can work.
“No one can fix our rigged economy overnight. Our structural inequality is decades in the making. But one piece of the solution is to take on one of the largest industries in our country: Health care.
“Halfway measures allow corporations to continue profiting off the sick,” he declared.
“The boldest possible reform, Medicare For All, brings together the broadest possible movement.” What won’t do that is “overly complex incremental measures”—a jab at the Obama-era Affordable Care Act—”that prop up the same systems we’re seeing fail under the weight of attacks by Trump and Republicans.
“The American people are hungry for bold ideas that reform fundamental institutions that have failed them for too long. And they are looking for leaders who will take on powerful interests and fight for working people.”
Singh urges readers to kick-start the movement via letters and e-mails to lawmakers now, but PNHP recognizes that crafting the system and gathering the massive support will take time.
That’s also why it enlisted the 325 groups. They include National Nurses United, which has led the campaign for single-payer within its home state of California and within the AFL-CIO for decades, along with its affiliates in California, D.C., Michigan, Minnesota, and New York.
Other international unions signing the letter are the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, the Professional and Technical Engineers, the United Auto Workers, and the Postal Workers.
Locals and allied groups joining in are Teachers/AFT Retirees in Washington State, the Charlotte-Metrolina Labor Council and Communications Workers Local 3641, both in Charlotte, N.C., the Committee of Interns and Residents of the Service Employees, the Institute for Policy Studies’ Poverty Project, and the Maryland State Education Association.
Also signing on are chapters of Jobs With Justice in Missouri and Portland, Ore., AFSCME’s Minnesota and the Dakotas Retirees Chapter, the Minnesota AFL-CIO’s Retirees Council, One Fair Wage, and the Movement of Rank and File Educators of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers.
Outside progressive groups include every single Chicago area chapter of Indivisible, several Democratic Socialist local parties, and the Sunrise Movement.
The single-payer advocates already have popular opinion on their side, Singh pointed out.
“In fact, 90% of Democratic voters and 63% of all voters support Medicare For All. Americans believe the government should guarantee health care to everyone, and anything less means tens of millions of people in the U.S. continuing to suffer from the lack of necessary care and the prospect of medical debt if they do seek care.”
PNHP will also have to overcome the immense financial clout of the medical-insurance complex, which now consumes more than one of every five dollars of U.S. output of goods and services, second among all sectors only to finance and real estate.
That same complex is also generous to politicians, and often holds them in its sway. When Democrats ran Congress, the financial clout of the health insurers blocked it, and the GOP would scream the Democrats were imposing socialism.
And in the March 17, 2026, Democratic primary for an open U.S. Senate seat in Illinois, the eventual winner, Lieut. Gov. Juliana Stratton hung the fact that Rep. Robin Kelly took more than half of her campaign contributions from medical and pharmaceutical campaign finance committees around Kelly’s neck. Kelly retorted, “I’m not a cheap date.”
Kelly finished third in the race. Stratton, who refused corporate campaign cash but benefited from a campaign finance committee established by her boss, Gov. J.B. Pritzker, won. Another hopeful, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, who outraised and outspent the other two combined, finished second.
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