Medicare for All!
A Conversation with National Nurses United
This piece originally appeared on Fran Quigley’s Substack We Can Do Better: Ending Poverty in Our Time on September 25, 2026
When it comes to healthcare, our U.S. system’s inefficiencies and emphasis on profiteering have created a remarkable, tragic combination: we pay historic-level, world-leading sums of money on healthcare–$6 trillion per year–while enduring some of the world’s worst coverage and health outcomes.
Our guest this week, Jasmine Ruddy of National Nurses United explains to us why our healthcare system is broken and why NNU–the largest union of registered nurses in U.S. history–supports a single-payer Medicare for All solution. Importantly, Jasmine also shares with why Medicare for All is winnable in the near future–a victory that would make U.S. history and save or improve millions of American lives.
The big winners in the current U.S. healthcare system are for-profit health insurance corporations and monopoly-protected pharmaceutical corporations. Meanwhile, nearly 27 million Americans go without health insurance. Another 46 million are underinsured, meaning they struggle to afford deductibles and then far too often find that their insurers refuse to pay for prescribed care and procedures. Four in ten U.S. adults fail to take prescriptions, go without recommended care, or do not see a doctor even when sick.
These gaps carry consequences. Every year, tens of thousands of Americans die preventable deaths due to inability to afford care. Over 40% of U.S. adults report carrying debt caused by medical or dental bills. These outcomes are unthinkable in other nations with resources similar to those possessed by the U.S.
Ironically, the most promising aspect of the U.S. healthcare system is contained within the overall dismal numbers. As a nation, we already spend more than enough on healthcare to afford universal, comprehensive coverage and far better health outcomes. Proposals for a single-payer U.S. healthcare system, often referred to as Medicare for All, would replace private health insurance companies with public financing of health care.
Even as it ensures access to all medically necessary services—including dental and vision needs and prescription drugs—multiple studies show the efficiencies and profit-avoidance of Medicare for All would allow the program to cost hundreds of billions less per year than the U.S.’s current system. So it is not surprising that, as Jasmine Ruddy tells us, a healthy majority of Americans support a single-payer system like Medicare for All.
In this episode, we discuss the path to making that a reality—perhaps as soon as 2029!
You can listen to and/or watch this episode and our past shows at our podcast channels on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. Thank you for reading and listening!
