There’s Always Money for War, Never Healthcare
/By Crystal Lindell
When Sen. Bernie Sanders was running for president in 2020, he campaigned for universal healthcare, also known as “Medicare for All.”
As someone with a chronic illness that started to impact my life at just 29 years old, it’s a program I supported. I was too young for traditional Medicare, and was quickly getting too sick for traditional work. So, I was desperate for a realistic alternative.
But any time Bernie’s Medicare for All proposal was mentioned, people always responded in the same robotic way: “How are we going to pay for it?”
They were not calling for the federal budget to suddenly be balanced. The question was solely intended to make advocacy for Medicare for All sound childish. And unaffordable.
Nobody ever asks that about war though.
As the United States showered multi-million-dollar bombs and missiles on Iran this week, the war was framed as such a national security imperative that the cost was barely worth addressing.
Questions about how we’ll pay for the war were dismissed as absurd by the political class and by many Americans.
But no mistake, there is a price tag — and it’s a large one.
Kent Smetters, director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model and one of the nation’s foremost fiscal analysts, told Fortune that the total economic cost of “Operation Epic Fury” could reach $210 billion.
It’s tempting to think of these things as separate problems. War in one bucket, healthcare in another.
But the thing about my federal taxes is that I don’t pay them in separate buckets. I pay my taxes and let someone else decide how to spend it.
That means, when they take my tax money and give it to weapons manufacturers, that’s money not spent on funding things that would actually improve my life as a citizen, like universal healthcare.
It’s a lose-lose option.
I was laid off from my full-time job in 2022 — and that was the last time that I had health insurance. In the years since, I have navigated life with a mix of freelancing, DoorDashing, and cash payments for medical care that I couldn’t avoid.
In fact, I have a prescription to pick up this afternoon, and my main concern is a familiar one: “How am I going to pay for it?”
When our government abandons us, our problems don’t go away. Rather, they just turn into personal struggles that we are expected to figure out on our own.
So, if it’s childish to not want my taxes used to kill people in Iran, and childish to prefer that money be use for universal healthcare – then call me a little kid, because that’s not the type of adulthood I want to be a part of.
