Health Is Power: Why the U.S. Healthcare System Was Built to Fail.
Demolish the old system thoroughly and set fire to the ghost of inequality. This is a chance to create a new system outside of that identity completely; free of the socioeconomic burdens.
If we don’t act now, the next generation will inherit more than disease.
They will inherit our silence.
We are living inside a contradiction: a nation that spends more on healthcare than any other society in human history—over $4.5 trillion annually, or nearly 18% of GDP—yet our people are sicker, more exhausted, and more hopeless than ever. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, 2023)
This is not a failure of science. It’s not a shortage of knowledge, innovation, or talent. It’s a system functioning exactly as designed: to profit from pain.
A System That Extracts Instead of Heals
The U.S. ranks last among high-income countries in access to care, health outcomes, and equity—despite outspending all peers by far. Commonwealth Fund, 2023)
Step into any emergency room, and you’ll see it: patients waiting for hours, nurses rushing past stretchers, families deciding between prescriptions and rent. One in four Americans skip necessary care due to cost, while 100 million are saddled with medical debt. KFF, 2022 & Gallup, 2022)
We call it “healthcare,” but what we have is disease management wrapped in a price tag. A business model built on billing codes, not human codes. On treatment, not healing. On transactions, not trust.
The Frontlines of Compassion
No one knows this better than nurses.
They don’t bear witness from a distance—they carry the weight of this broken economy on their backs. More than 90% of U.S. nurses report burnout, moral injury, or chronic distress. Staffing shortages and unsafe conditions have led to record strikes, resignations, and even rising suicide rates within the profession. American Nurses Foundation, 2023 & National Academy of Medicine, 2022)
They watch dreams die in hospital beds. They are asked to explain costs before they can offer cures. They stay after their shifts to comfort grieving families. They don’t get to look away.
And still, somehow, they keep showing up.
What If We Chose Something Different?
But what if we imagined another way forward?
What if health wasn’t something we had to purchase, but something we cultivated together?
What if our communities became places of restoration—not just survival?
This vision isn’t abstract. It’s reflected in community-led clinics, mutual aid networks, and trauma-informed public schools emerging across the country—from the South Bronx to rural Kentucky.
Investments in social determinants of health—housing, nutrition, education—can reduce healthcare costs and improve outcomes. For example, a study in Health Affairs found that supportive housing reduced Medicaid costs by up to 40% per patient. Health Affairs, 2020)
We need a new kind of capital: Soul Capital.
Measured not in market share, but in lives uplifted.
Built not through exploitation, but through empathy.
A Warning and a Call
In 2020, the World Health Organization declared it the Year of the Nurse and Midwife—not only to honor a profession, but to issue a warning: our global health systems cannot survive without the leadership, presence, and care of frontline workers.
(Source: WHO, 2020)
If we don’t act, the future won’t ask what we knew.
It will ask why we stayed silent.
Rebuild It—Together
We must build a new system.
Not around money, but around meaning.
Around care. Around community. Around the human spirit.
Because health is power. Health is freedom.
And the future of humanity depends on what we choose—right now.
As society is fear mongered into threat of losing access to healthcare, the risk of government intervention and the idealistic concept of universal healthcare is higher than it’s ever been for our industrialized nation. We’re all in more danger than we realize, both as patient and as citizen.
It sounds great to simply say “healthcare for all” but the reality of universal healthcare is the expansion of governmental power and authority, and regulated oversight of the practice of medicine and healthcare. Even those who are dependent upon governmental oversight and naively believe that our elected politicians are advocating in our best interests, cannot ignore the very concerning track record between government and its unethical experimentation on its citizens; more than once they’ve been exposed for ethical misconduct and intentional manipulation of the patient provider relationship.
It wouldn’t be unreasonable to probably just get rid of informed consent all together with the medical physician; as the branches of government don’t typically engage in public information transparency or the pursuit of consent, informed or otherwise. As medical doctors with the years of time-served, expertise starts to develop and the medical physician no longer values “informed consent” of the patient, as the physician “expert” already knows what is best for the patient, and the paternalistic stigma eats away at the fringes of ethical patient care.
There’s a more detailed post to follow, where the pros and cons are weighed at length against universal coverage benefits and the opposite effect of increasing governmental power; how the potential loss of authority by healthcare professionals in their own practice.
Governments are primarily run on the premise of efficiency. Budget, spending, deficit.
Do you really want your physical health managed by the same efficiency processes as in other sectors?
Your health is the one true link to this existence, the intersectionality between the inside and outside, tethered to one side or the other and labeled accordingly by the separation between the “living” and “deceased.”
If you don’t have your health, do you have your other rights?
Well if you’re dead you certainly can’t execute your free speech rights, bear arms, have an abortion, identify with LQBQT or suffer from issues of gender identity. If you’re dead, you can’t vote, fight back, or stand up to opposition.
Health as the KEY freedom, the one shared value of all individuals, the one thing that matters most to our existence.
Let’s not put it in the hands of governmental control. Let’s take health into our own hands. Maintain our authority in the profession and find a better way to provide health care to all Americans, a way without the totalitarian regime as the sponge soaking up our sovereignty and minimizing personal autonomy before one even realizes what is happening.