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US Medalist's Experience of Free Healthcare in Olympic Village Bolsters Case for Medicare for All
"In the Olympic Village in Paris, everyone has free healthcare as a human right. In America, 1 in 4 cancer patients go bankrupt or lose their homes because of the outrageously high cost of care."
Aug 09, 2024
U.S. Olympic rugby player Ariana Ramsey became a sensation on social media this week after documenting a series of free healthcare visits in the Olympic Village in Paris and becoming an advocate for universal care in her home country.
Ramsey's initial TikTok video, published Saturday, went viral in France after she expressed disbelief about the free healthcare on offer, playing into the European idea that Americans—who live in the only high-income country in the world without universal care—don't know what they are missing.
"I literally just got a pap smear—for free," Ramsey, who won a bronze medal last week, said. "And I have a dentist appointment, and an eye exam next week. Like, what!?"
@ariana.ramsey I quite literally love it here. The way the Olympic village has free healthcare, but America doesn’t😣 #o#olympicso#olympicvillageo#olympiant#teamusar#rugbyb#bronzemedalist ♬ original sound - Ari Ramsey
The Olympic Village polyclinic offers cardiology, orthopedics, physiotherapy, psychology, podiatry and sports medicine—all free of charge to athletes, according toSports Illustrated. The tradition of free healthcare for athletes dates back nearly a century.
Ramsey, a 24-year-old from Pennsylvania who played rugby at Dartmouth College, said in a video that "there's no reason why me, an American girl, should be so amazed by free healthcare."
In a separate post on Monday, recording while sitting in a dentist's chair, Ramsey said, "This is going to be my new fight for action, free healthcare in America. Period."
She now describes herself as a "universal free healthcare advocate" in her TikTok bio.
Medicare for All advocates argued that everyone in the U.S. should have the same access to healthcare that athletes have at the Olympics.
"In the Olympic Village in Paris, everyone has free healthcare as a human right," Warren Gunnels, a top aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and a staff director for the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, wrote on social media. "In America, 1 in 4 cancer patients go bankrupt or lose their homes because of the outrageously high cost of care and 68,000 die a year because they can't afford healthcare. Yes. We need Medicare for All."
Many Olympians have other jobs to pay the bills. Ramsey, for example, is a certified personal trainer. The U.S. is one of the only countries that doesn't directly fund its Olympic athletes, according toVoice of America.
"U.S. Olympians are using their trip to the Olympics to get the basic preventative healthcare they can't afford to get in the U.S.," Melanie D'Arrigo, the executive director of Campaign for New York Health, wrote on social media. "We should be embarrassed that we're the only industrialized country without universal healthcare—all because lobbyists pay off our politicians."
If Ramsey's newfound role as a political campaigner comes as a surprise, it's not the first for her in Paris: the U.S. women's team had never before medaled in rugby, and the last U.S. men's medal was 100 years ago.
The result came in stunning fashion. Down to Australia in the final seconds of the bronze medal match, Ramsey got the ball and threw it to teammate Alex Sedrick, who made a miraculous run the length of the field to tie the game just as time expired, and then converted a kick to win the game.
THE MOST CLUTCH TRY IN @USARugby HISTORY 😱
Spiff Sedrick wins it for Team USA in the final seconds!#ParisOlympicspic.twitter.com/lml8fLVmsn
— Team USA (@TeamUSA) July 30, 2024
For Ramsey, the bronze medal likely means she'll receive a bonus of $15,000 from the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee. She's also tried to maximize the medical benefits of being an Olympian in Paris, visiting a gynecologist, dentist, and ophthalmologist.
Back home, medical services won't be as accessible, at least not for many Americans. There were more than 25 million non-elderly uninsured people in the U.S. as of 2022, according to KFF, a health policy research nonprofit. Even a routine pap smear can cost $125 to $250 for an uninsured person. U.S. spending on health care exceeds any other high-income country and yet its health outcomes are consistently the worst among peer nations.
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US Medalist's Experience of Free Healthcare in Olympic Village Bolsters Case for Medicare for All
"In the Olympic Village in Paris, everyone has free healthcare as a human right. In America, 1 in 4 cancer patients go bankrupt or lose their homes because of the outrageously high cost of care."
Aug 09, 2024
U.S. Olympic rugby player Ariana Ramsey became a sensation on social media this week after documenting a series of free healthcare visits in the Olympic Village in Paris and becoming an advocate for universal care in her home country.
Ramsey's initial TikTok video, published Saturday, went viral in France after she expressed disbelief about the free healthcare on offer, playing into the European idea that Americans—who live in the only high-income country in the world without universal care—don't know what they are missing.
"I literally just got a pap smear—for free," Ramsey, who won a bronze medal last week, said. "And I have a dentist appointment, and an eye exam next week. Like, what!?"
@ariana.ramsey I quite literally love it here. The way the Olympic village has free healthcare, but America doesn’t😣 #o#olympicso#olympicvillageo#olympiant#teamusar#rugbyb#bronzemedalist ♬ original sound - Ari Ramsey
The Olympic Village polyclinic offers cardiology, orthopedics, physiotherapy, psychology, podiatry and sports medicine—all free of charge to athletes, according toSports Illustrated. The tradition of free healthcare for athletes dates back nearly a century.
Ramsey, a 24-year-old from Pennsylvania who played rugby at Dartmouth College, said in a video that "there's no reason why me, an American girl, should be so amazed by free healthcare."
In a separate post on Monday, recording while sitting in a dentist's chair, Ramsey said, "This is going to be my new fight for action, free healthcare in America. Period."
She now describes herself as a "universal free healthcare advocate" in her TikTok bio.
Medicare for All advocates argued that everyone in the U.S. should have the same access to healthcare that athletes have at the Olympics.
"In the Olympic Village in Paris, everyone has free healthcare as a human right," Warren Gunnels, a top aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and a staff director for the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, wrote on social media. "In America, 1 in 4 cancer patients go bankrupt or lose their homes because of the outrageously high cost of care and 68,000 die a year because they can't afford healthcare. Yes. We need Medicare for All."
Many Olympians have other jobs to pay the bills. Ramsey, for example, is a certified personal trainer. The U.S. is one of the only countries that doesn't directly fund its Olympic athletes, according toVoice of America.
"U.S. Olympians are using their trip to the Olympics to get the basic preventative healthcare they can't afford to get in the U.S.," Melanie D'Arrigo, the executive director of Campaign for New York Health, wrote on social media. "We should be embarrassed that we're the only industrialized country without universal healthcare—all because lobbyists pay off our politicians."
If Ramsey's newfound role as a political campaigner comes as a surprise, it's not the first for her in Paris: the U.S. women's team had never before medaled in rugby, and the last U.S. men's medal was 100 years ago.
The result came in stunning fashion. Down to Australia in the final seconds of the bronze medal match, Ramsey got the ball and threw it to teammate Alex Sedrick, who made a miraculous run the length of the field to tie the game just as time expired, and then converted a kick to win the game.
THE MOST CLUTCH TRY IN @USARugby HISTORY 😱
Spiff Sedrick wins it for Team USA in the final seconds!#ParisOlympicspic.twitter.com/lml8fLVmsn
— Team USA (@TeamUSA) July 30, 2024
For Ramsey, the bronze medal likely means she'll receive a bonus of $15,000 from the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee. She's also tried to maximize the medical benefits of being an Olympian in Paris, visiting a gynecologist, dentist, and ophthalmologist.
Back home, medical services won't be as accessible, at least not for many Americans. There were more than 25 million non-elderly uninsured people in the U.S. as of 2022, according to KFF, a health policy research nonprofit. Even a routine pap smear can cost $125 to $250 for an uninsured person. U.S. spending on health care exceeds any other high-income country and yet its health outcomes are consistently the worst among peer nations.
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TikTok Sues US Government Over 'Unconstitutional' Potential Ban
One expert said legislators' admissions "that the ban was motivated by a desire to suppress content about the Israel-Gaza conflict will make the law especially difficult for the government to defend," said one First Amendment expert.
May 07, 2024
A top First Amendment expert on Tuesday said TikTok has a strong case against the U.S. government as the social media platform filed a federal lawsuit against a potential ban—particularly since proponents of the law have admitted it is aimed at blocking Americans' access to news out of Gaza.
The platform filed the lawsuit against U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit nearly two weeks after President Joe Biden signed the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversaries Act into law as part of a larger foreign aid package.
Under the law, TikTok parent company ByteDance, a Chinese firm, has 270 days to sell the platform, allowing it to continue operating in the U.S. If it does not sell TikTok, the app will no longer be available on U.S. networks and app stores.
As Common Dreams reported Monday, Republican lawmakers including U.S. Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) have linked TikTok to the burgeoning anti-war protest movement spreading across the U.S., with the latter saying in an interview with Secretary of State Antony Blinken last Friday that "there was such overwhelming support" in Congress to shut down TikTok because of the frequent posting of Palestine-related content on the app.
"Restricting citizens' access to media from abroad is a practice that has long been associated with repressive regimes, so it's sad and alarming to see our own government going down this road," said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, on Tuesday. "TikTok's challenge to the ban is important, and we expect it to succeed. The First Amendment means the government can't restrict Americans' access to ideas, information, or media from abroad without a very good reason for it—and no such reason exists here."
"The fact that some legislators have acknowledged that the ban was motivated by a desire to suppress content about the Israel-Gaza conflict will make the law especially difficult for the government to defend," Jaffer added.
The law's sponsors claim it "is not a ban because it offers ByteDance a choice: divest TikTok's U.S. business or be shut down," reads the lawsuit. "But in reality, there is no choice. The 'qualified divestiture' demanded by the act to allow TikTok to continue operating in the United States is simply not possible: not commercially, not technologically, not legally."
Even if selling the app within the time frame was feasible, added TikTok and ByteDance, the law "would still be an extraordinary and unconstitutional assertion of power," ultimately allowing Congress to "circumvent the First Amendment by invoking national security and ordering the publisher of any individual newspaper or website to sell to avoid being shut down."
"And for TikTok, any such divestiture would disconnect Americans from the rest of the global community on a platform devoted to shared content—an outcome fundamentally at odds with the Constitution's commitment to both free speech and individual liberty," the plaintiffs continued.
At The Philadelphia Inquirer on Tuesday, columnist Will Bunch noted that about a third of Americans between the ages of 18-29 get their news from TikTok, according to a recent Pew survey—as Romney openly stated he fears last week.
As Bunch wrote:
During the war in Gaza, most mainstream Western journalists have been blocked from entering the war zone. The best source of real-time information is often the phone video of airstrikes and their aftermath either shot by Palestinian journalists—more than 90 of whom have been killed—or civilian bystanders. Look, there's disinformation about every issue on social media—it's a serious problem. I'm a clueless boomer myself about TikTok, but I do spend way too much time on X/Twitter and I can tell you exactly what is radicalizing young people about Gaza.
The reason so many under-30 folks have adopted the Palestinian cause isn't disinformation, from Hamas or China or anyone else. They've been radicalized by the truth—daily videos of young children, some of them bloodied, some of them already dead, covered in dust and targeted by 2,000-pound dumb bombs made right here in America.
"If the real motivation for zapping TikTok from your phone is to silence legitimate political speech, just because a lot of members of Congress don't like it," wrote Bunch, "then this bill is the worst attack on the First Amendment since the government was sending World War I critics like Eugene V. Debs and Kate Richards O'Hare to prison, more than 100 years ago."
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