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national nurses united
Medicare for All, Says Sanders, Would Show American People 'Government Is Listening to Them'
"The goal of the current administration and their billionaire buddies is to pile on endless cuts," said one nurse and union leader. "Even on our hardest days, we won't stop fighting for Medicare for All."
Apr 29, 2025
On Tuesday, Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Democratic Reps. Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Debbie Dingell of Michigan reintroduced the Medicare for All Act, re-upping the legislative quest to enact a single-payer healthcare system even as the bill faces little chance of advancing in the GOP-controlled House of Representatives or Senate.
Hundreds of nurses, healthcare providers, and workers from across the country joined the lawmakers for a press conference focused on the bill's reintroduction in front of the Capitol on Tuesday.
"We have the radical idea of putting healthcare dollars into healthcare, not into profiteering or bureaucracy," said Sanders during the press conference. "A simple healthcare system, which is what we are talking about, substantially reduces administrative costs, but it would also make life a lot easier, not just for patients, but for nurses" and other healthcare providers, he continued.
"So let us stand together," Sanders told the crowd. "Let us do what the American people want and let us transform this country. And when we pass Medicare for All, it's not only about improving healthcare for all our people—it's doing something else. It's telling the American people that, finally, the American government is listening to them."
Under Medicare for All, the government would pay for all healthcare services, including dental, vision, prescription drugs, and other care.
"It is a travesty when 85 million people are uninsured or underinsured and millions more are drowning in medical debt in the richest nation on Earth," said Jayapal in a statement on Tuesday.
In 2020, a study in the peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet found that a single-payer program like Medicare for All would save Americans more than $450 billion and would likely prevent 68,000 deaths every year. That same year, the Congressional Budget Office found that a single-payer system that resembles Medicare for All would yield some $650 billion in savings in 2030.
Members of National Nurses United (NNU), the nation's largest union of registered nurses, were also at the press conference on Tuesday.
In a statement, the group highlighted that the bill comes at a critical time, given GOP-led threats to programs like Medicaid.
"The goal of the current administration and their billionaire buddies is to pile on endless cuts and attacks so that we become too demoralized and overwhelmed to move forward," said Bonnie Castillo, registered nurse and executive director of NNU. "Even on our hardest days, we won't stop fighting for Medicare for All."
Per Sanders' office, the legislation has 104 co-sponsors in the House and 16 in the Senate, which is an increase from the previous Congress.
A poll from Gallup released in 2023 found that 7 in 10 Democrats support a government-run healthcare system. The poll also found that across the political spectrum, 57% of respondents believe the government should ensure all people have healthcare coverage.
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What Trump’s Covid-19 Malfeasance Warns Us About the Next Epidemics
With confirmation hearings soon to begin for Kennedy and other healthcare department heads with similar views about to begin, the threat of future pandemics in an administration with a disastrous track record is another reason to urge their defeat.
Jan 15, 2025
One barely noticed pledge by President-elect Donald Trump during the 2024 campaign appeared in a May Time magazine interview that offers an especially ominous warning about Trump 2.0. If he won a new term, Trump said, he would “probably” disband the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response policy established by Congress in 2022.
Fast forward to his new nominees, especially Secretary of Health and Human Services anti-vax conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has said he would pause National Institute of Health infectious disease and drug development research for eight years. As the saying goes, we might have a problem.
With confirmation hearings soon to begin for Kennedy and other healthcare department heads with similar views about to begin, the threat of future pandemics in an administration with a disastrous track record is another reason to urge their defeat.
If the U.S. had the same death rate as Australia, The New York Times later reported, about 900,000 American lives would have been saved.
The 2022 law was prompted by the worst pandemic in a century, that has killed over 1.2 million Americans. The law’s roots were in a pandemic global health security office former President Barack Obama set in the National Security Council. It followed Obama’s experiences with the H1N1 swine flu pandemic in 2009 that killed up to 575,000 people globally, including more than 12,000 in the U.S., and the 2014 Ebola outbreak that claimed thousands of lives in West Africa and provoked a major scare in the U.S.
Trump eliminated the office in 2018, suggesting, The Associated Press reported, “that he did not see the threat of pandemics in the same way that many experts in the field did.” In March, 2020, former pandemic office director Beth Cameron wrote she was “mystified” by the unit’s shutdown “leaving the country less prepared for pandemics… all with the goal of avoiding a six-alarm blaze.” Trump officials insisted they were fully prepared. Facts on the ground tell a different story.
In December 2019 the first reports emerged of patients in China suffering symptoms of an unknown pneumonia-like illness, drawing reminders of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus, SARS Cov-1. By early January 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) began referring to the outbreak as a 2019 Novel Coronavirus, soon to be renamed Covid-19.
With infections spreading in Asia, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in late January reported the first U.S. cases. The first U.S. deaths occurred in January 2020. By mid-March, when Cameron’s op-ed appeared, the WHO confirmed more than 118,000 Covid cases and 4,291 deaths.
Australia, which had a similar profile of libertarian individualism and a right-wing prime minister in 2020, created a bipartisan response with opposition Labor Party and state leaders, and medical officers out front. They quickly subsidized production and distribution of masks, prioritized testing and contact tracing, and understood some shutdowns were necessary. If the U.S. had the same death rate as Australia, TheNew York Times later reported, about 900,000 American lives would have been saved.
Trump: ‘It’s Going to Be Fine’
The first year of Covid-19 was critical to establishing the protocols and public health protections to confront the crisis and reduce the deaths and suffering. But, due to widespread government failures, infections spread like wildfires. Yet the Trump administration was glacially slow to react. In his first public statement January 22, 2020, Trump declared, “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”
In multiple comments tracked by Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), Trump downplayed the danger. February 2020: “Looks like by April… when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away,” “CDC and my Administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus,” “We’re going very substantially down, not up,” and, “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
Due to Trump’s malfeasance; promotion of misinformation, including false miracle cures; and actively discouraging government and community safety steps to slow the spread, Covid-19 exploded.
As Trump’s term ended on January 20, 2021, the U.S. recorded 25 million cases, and over 400,000 deaths.
Embracing the sluggish signals from Washington, hospitals stalled on adopting critical safety protocols and were ill-prepared for the flood of desperately ill patients that led to cascading deaths, with bodies piling up in makeshift morgues or refrigerated trucks outside hospital doors. It was made worse by inadequate isolation of infected patients and shortages of ventilators and proper protective equipment for overwhelmed nurses and other healthcare workers who paid a horrific price with thousands of deaths and many leaving due to unwillingness to work in unsafe conditions.
Trump’s failures continued for months. At a White House press conference on April 3, Trump eroded a new tepid CDC guidance people consider wearing masks, as other countries were now requiring to reduce transmission of the virus, by adding he would not do so.
Trump’s position, New York University sociologist Eric Klinenberg recalled, “undermined it,” suggesting “to anyone in his world that wears a mask, it’s cowardly, weak, feminine, so no one’s going to wear masks. [It] becomes clear to everyone in the Republican establishment that bearing your face is the way to show solidarity and support to the president,” reinforcing a partisan political divide on not just masks but soon all public health measures.
In late April 2020, as the U.S. death toll passed 60,000, Trump said, “This is going away.” In May, amid 80,000 deaths, Trump said, “We have met the moment, and we have prevailed.” In June, with 110,000 dead Americans, Trump said, “It is dying out, it’s going to fade away.”
On August 31, with the death count passing 180,000, Trump said, “We’ve done a great job in Covid, but we don’t get the credit” blaming a “fake news media conspiracy.” For months, Trump demanded an end to steps some states were implementing to limit infections. As Trump’s term ended on January 20, 2021, the U.S. recorded 25 million cases, and over 400,000 deaths.
National Nurses United (NNU), one of the first to respond to prior pandemics during H1N1 in 2009 and Ebola in 2014, had gained valuable experience. By early January, 2020, “before most people in the U.S. had even heard of Covid-19,” as The New York Times noted, NNU began mobilizing and aggressively pushing employers, government elected officials, and health and regulatory agencies to implement decisive safety actions. In contrast to public agencies, NNU launched multiple public endeavors from rallies to marches, vigils, pickets, and other collective action, including strikes, to demand optimal protections for nurses, other healthcare workers, patients, and the broader public.
Employers took their lead from Trump and the federal agencies he influenced, including the CDC and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) that continually eroded safety guidelines and workplace regulations. Hospitals, observed NNU executive director Bonnie Castillo, RN, “took a gamble relative to how much to have and how much to be prepared. And the CDC came out with guidelines shifting, commensurate to what the hospitals are complaining of. The lower standard is cheaper. So they just kept lowering and lowering, all the way down to bandannas. They’re looking at us like fodder.”
The racist Legacy of Trump’s Covid-19 Malfeasance
Trump’s mismanagement and indifference to who was most harmed proved catastrophic for communities of color, including a large percentage who were essential workers in transit, food processing, service industries, and healthcare.
Early in the pandemic, Trump sought to shift blame from his administration to China, repeatedly referring to Covid-19 as “the China virus,” though by April the U.S., with 4% of the world’s population, accounted for 17% of global Covid-19 deaths. Trump’s racist scapegoating ignited a sharp rise in anti-Asian hate speech and physical assaults.
His future HHS nominee Kennedy was among those adding fuel to the fire. At a 2023 New York press event Kennedy claimed “there is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately… The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
“We’re being treated like we don’t matter and we’re dispensable.”
Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) healthcare workers subsequently reported a rise in racist incidents, both in hospital settings and in their daily lives. Twice as many verbal and physical assaults were directed at women. “We must unite to challenge anti-Asian violence, harassment, and racism,” said University of California San Diego RN Dahlia Tayag at a statewide California Nurses Association protest against ongoing anti-Asian hate crimes.
The disproportionate racial impact was evident in Covid=19’s devastating toll on Filipino healthcare workers. Kansas City RN Celia Yap Banago, one of many RNs who had pressed her hospital to fix inadequate protections, was one of the first RNs to die in April 2020. “We were being told we’re not allowed to wear masks because it’s going to scare our patients,” said Jenn Caldwell, RN.
By August 2023 when the government stopped reporting healthcare-worker Covid-19 data, 5,753 healthcare workers, including 501 RNs, had died of Covid-19. In a June interview, Zenei Triunfo-Cortez, RN, CNA/NNOC’s first Filipina president, noted that nurses call for help from Trump and Congress “fell on deaf ears… Our employers are banking on (CDC) guidelines, which have been watered down… We’re being treated like we don’t matter and we’re dispensable.”
The Racial Disparity of Infections and Death
Centuries of structural racism accelerate the disproportionate impact of any crisis, including pandemics. As Trump was continuing to downplay the tsunami of infections and deaths, and discouraging safety procedures, the racial impact escalated. Black Chicagoans, 30% of city residents, comprised 72% of the Covid-19 deaths. Black Michigan residents, under 15% of the population, accounted for 40% of the deaths. Milwaukee African Americans, 26% of the population, totaled 70% of Covid-19 deaths. Similar rates were evident across the country, from states with large Black populations like North and South Carolina, to those with smaller percentages, such as Nevada and Connecticut.
Latinos were 80% of the first people admitted for care at San Francisco’s large public hospital and in Latino San Jose neighborhoods. Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islander infection and death rates were also higher in California. In March 2020, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham cited “incredible spikes” in Navajo Nation. Two months later, Navajo Nation still had higher Covid-19 infection cases per capita than much more publicized, hard-hit New York City.
Columnist Jamelle Bouie linked the disparities to “longstanding structural inequities.” Systemic racism in healthcare had a long history, evident in less access to medical institutions and caregivers, provider treatment biases, lower rates of costly health coverage, housing segregation, and higher concentration in polluted neighborhoods. Hospitals in Black neighborhoods were far more likely to close than in mostly white areas, a National Institutes of Health study found.
“What it meant to be an essential worker was to be deemed expendable.”
Black and Latino workers were also far more likely to hold “essential” jobs. Many were concentrated in lower paid jobs often forced to keep working due to economic need or employer pressure, including in food services, grocery and drug stores, and poultry and other meat processing plants. The Guardianreported alarmingly high transit worker death rates among bus and subway drivers, mechanics, and maintenance workers in New York, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Washington D.C., and other major cities.
In September 2020, the CDC drew condemnation for reportedly soft-pedaling safety precautions due to political interference at a South Dakota meatpacking plant. All these factors resulted in workers of color having less economic ability or opportunity to shelter or work from home, and less access to safety measures, from masks to social distancing on the job where they risked constant exposure.
It also reinforced a class chasm with “a lot of professional and more affluent people who could afford to make the kind of sacrifices this public emergency called for who were able to protect themselves, able to sustain a level of comfort that other people in America were not,” says sociologist Klinenberg.
“It wasn’t like when we called them essential, we said, because you’re essential we’re going to honor you, we’re giving you masks, you get the best access to healthcare in the world, and here’s a bonus from all of us and our forever gratitude. What it meant to be an essential worker was to be deemed expendable. And it wasn’t just you, you got exposed to the virus, then you were more likely to go back home to your family who also got exposed to the virus. So you’ve got these neighborhoods throughout the country where there’s a lot of working class people who are getting exposed and they have higher mortality,” he added.
“Covid was kind of a search light that showed us everyone, everywhere we had studiously looked away from,” writer and activist Naomi Klein observed. “Suddenly we’re forced to think about the way in which our culture produces disposable people, whether they are working in elder care facilities when there’s suddenly Covid outbreaks, or the poultry plants [that] were Covid hotspots. Places where you never see a camera because we’re not supposed to think about, [like] what’s going on in prisons.” Klein cited “the myth of neoliberalism, like we are just individual people and families, and we don’t owe anything to each other. Covid said that wasn’t the case because you can’t just treat individuals, you have to treat a body of enmeshed individuals.”
Workers and unions had to fight their employers and public agencies under Trump to protect their members and the public. Union pressure, Castillo told The New York Times, moved some hospitals to act. In the first six months alone, NNU “staged more than 350 socially distanced protests, including two vigils in front of the White House for the nurses who died from the virus.”
Though Trump’s first term ended with the rollout of a Covid-19 vaccine, lasting damage had been done with his encouragement of opposition to critical community protections from masking to social isolation to needed closures to reduce the spread of the virus, and his sympathy for an escalating anti-vax movement. NNU early in 2021 characterized the Trump administration’s response as “one of denial and abandonment.”
Going forward, with Trump nominating people with similar views opposing the importance of a robust approach to public health, including full preparedness and action on sure-to-come future epidemics, there is ample cause for concern. A new avian flu’s first U.S. death has already occurred. Measles, polio, and other illnesses could mushroom, especially with health officials hostile to vaccines in charge of health agencies with vaccination rates already declining.
With confirmation hearings approaching, The New York Times this week reported the alarming vaccination drop “creating new pockets of students no longer protected by herd immunity [with]… now an estimated 280,000 kindergartners without documented vaccination against measles, an increase of some 100,000 children from before the pandemic.” Resurgence of polio, once virtually eradicated, is also a threat.
Rising temperatures from climate change mean that bacteria not only grow faster but are also associated with increased antibiotic resistance, facilitating the rise of new deadly pandemics. Factor in expected cuts in federal agencies and reduced enforcement of workplace and community protections by an administration more friendly to corporate demands for cuts in regulations.
Over the coming days and years, our vigilance and mass action will be critical to protecting public health.
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Jayapal, Sanders Offer Answer to Elon Musk's Healthcare Cost Question
"The most efficiently run healthcare systems in the world," said National Nurses United, "have been proven time and time again to be single-payer systems."
Dec 05, 2024
Two of the United States' most outspoken critics of the for-profit health system welcomed billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk's criticism of the country's sky-high healthcare spending—and suggested that Musk, a potential Cabinet member in the incoming Trump administration, join the call for Medicare for All.
A social media post by Musk drew the attention of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who reintroduced legislation to expand Medicare coverage to every American last year and have long called for the for-profit healthcare system to be replaced by a government-run program, or single-payer system, like those in every other wealthy country in the world.
"Shouldn't the American people be getting getting their money's worth?" asked Musk, posting a graph from the nonpartisan Peter G. Peterson Foundation that showed how per capita administrative healthcare costs in the U.S. reached $1,055 in 2020—hundreds of dollars more than countries including Germany, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
"Yes," said Sanders, repeating statistics he has frequently shared while condemning the country's $4.5 trillion health system in which private, for-profit health insurance companies increasingly refuse to pay for healthcare services and Americans pay an average of $1,142 in out-of-pocket expenses each year.
"We waste hundreds of billions a year on healthcare administrative expenses that make insurance CEOs and wealthy stockholders incredibly rich while 85 million Americans go uninsured or underinsured," the senator added. "Healthcare is a human right. We need Medicare for All."
Jayapal added that she has "a solution" to exorbitant healthcare costs in the U.S.: "It's called Medicare for All."
Musk has been nominated by President-elect Donald Trump to lead a new federal agency that he wants to create called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Sanders has expressed support for some of the agency's mission, saying its plan to "cut wasteful expenditures" could be put to use at the Department of Defense, which has repeatedly failed audits of its annual spending.
But Sanders has sharply criticized the economic system and business practices that have helped make Musk the richest person in the world, with a net worth of $343.8 billion.
Another progressive, David Sirota of The Lever, suggested last month that DOGE could be used to eliminate the nation's vast health insurance bureaucracy and replace it with Medicare for All, pointing to a 2020 report from the Republican-controlled Congressional Budget Office that showed that a government-run healthcare program would save the country an estimated $650 billion each year.
"Such a system could achieve this in part because Medicare's 2% administrative costs are so much lower than the 17% administrative costs of the bureaucratic, profit-extracting private health insurance industry," wrote Sirota.
Musk drew the attention of Medicare for All advocates amid online discussion about the greed of for-profit insurance giants.
The killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on Wednesday prompted discussion about widespread anger over the U.S. healthcare system, and following public outcry, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield on Thursday backtracked on a decision to stop paying for surgical anesthesia if a procedure goes beyond a certain time limit. The American Society of Anesthesiologists said that if Anthem stopped fully paying doctors who provide pain management for complicated surgeries, patients would be left paying hundreds or thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket costs.
National Nurses United, which advocates for a government-run healthcare system, urged Musk and others who support the broadly popular proposal to "join the movement to win Medicare for All."
"The most efficiently run healthcare systems in the world," said the group, "have been proven time and time again to be single-payer systems."
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