> Why the fuck isn't there a law against this kind of shit?
There's a pretty clear answer to this question almost every single time it's asked... the people who benefit are wealthy and the people hurt are poor. The latter structurally lack the ability to fight it or lobby their congresspeople to change the law to help them. Until a mass movement steps forward to say "no, we will not tolerate this", nothing can possibly change. We have no recourse but each other and collective action.
Based on voting demographics, the poorest are the ones who are voting for politicians who hate the government and are opposed to any kind of subsidized healthcare.
How true is that? Poor people just don't vote, period. They're overworked, politicians don't listen to them, and in many states there are institutional barriers to casting a ballot even if one wanted to.
And it's not necessarily true among those who do vote either:
It's an old article and I don't doubt that 2016 has messed with the numbers, but the narrative of poor rednecks screwing themselves over every election is largely unfounded and smacks of classism.
Mostly because they believe and have been encouraged to believe that any protections/benefits would go to people who "don't deserve it" (also known as: whichever racial/ethnic demographic those voters have been raised to hate the most). They're very much in favor of discriminatory special-treatment programs that help them and only them, but very much against broad safety nets because they've been told such programs would only benefit the bad other people.
There's a lot to unpack here. First, neither party has the trust of the working class, whatever the rhetoric. Second, the candidate that talked about fixing the system, including healthcare, won -- that he was actually talking about breaking it further gets lost in the discourse around both candidates. There's a longer discussion to be had about how to build trust and what can be done about broken political systems, but it's not the parties that can act on that at this moment.
It will take something like the union/wildcat teachers' strikes, that forced Republican majorities with unified control of state governments to raise wages and increase funding, to do anything about healthcare or the many other structural challenges we face as a nation.
There's a pretty clear answer to this question almost every single time it's asked... the people who benefit are wealthy and the people hurt are poor. The latter structurally lack the ability to fight it or lobby their congresspeople to change the law to help them. Until a mass movement steps forward to say "no, we will not tolerate this", nothing can possibly change. We have no recourse but each other and collective action.