"A new white paper by Public Citizen lays out how the for-profit health care system left the U.S. vulnerable and unprepared for the COVID-19 pandemic, and how a single-payer, government-run health care system in which all Americans were covered would have helped the U.S. response to the crisis and prevented thousands of deaths.

“The pandemic has shown how wide the gaps in our health care system remain and how easy it is for families to fall through them. Too many Americans were already suffering unnecessarily prior to the pandemic and COVID-19 just exacerbated the challenges people face,” said Eagan Kemp, Public Citizen’s health care policy advocate. “We already spend far more than any comparably wealthy country on health care while achieving far less and were left wholly unprepared for the COVID-19 pandemic.”

The U.S. remains the only one of the 25 wealthiest countries to not provide universal health care, and the health care system’s focus on profits and not health has cost Americans their lives. Despite having less than 5% of the world’s population, the U.S. has had 25% of the world’s confirmed cases and 20% of the deaths. Public Citizen’s new report demonstrates how:"