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Seriously.
OK, let's say you want to set up a USHS (for lack of a better term). You're going to need hospitals, roads to connect them, amubulances. That's a stack of money going into construction and the auto industry right there. Then you have to fill the hospitals with beds, bedding, medical equipment, a canteen, maybe a newsstand. That's more money being pumped into the economy.
Then you need workers. Doctors and nurses, obviously but also janitors, groundkeepers, admin staff, IT specialists, a cook and serving staff (for the canteen), pharmacists, orderlies, someone to run the newsstand. A lot of those are unskilled or semi-skilled positions, positions that can be filled by people currently on the unemployment line. I've known people who were janitors, groundskeepers and suchlike in the NHS and it's a decent living. It's not luxury but it's a decent wage you can live on, unionised and pretty much recession-proof.
So, universal healthcare would pump a stack of money into the economy and create a load of jobs but what does it have to offer the moneyed class? Well, to start with, it's cheaper. OK, it costs an ungodly amount of money to set up but once it's done, you don't have to spend that kind of money again (as you might well have to with the banks), you just have to maintain it and that's pretty cheap. The current mixture of Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance costs Americans a combined total of around $2.3 trillion a year. Covering the entire US population under the NHS model would cost around $600 billion a year. Even the French model, generally accepted as the world's best, would only cost around $900 billion a year, less than half of what you currently pay so it means more money in the pockets of everyone who pays taxes. Oh, and private insurance spends typically 20-30% of it's expenditure on administration. The NHS, staffed by well-policed career civil servants with pensions and benefits, spends around 6.5% of it's expenditure on administration and they're unionised too so there goes that arguement.
A USHS can also deal with problems before they become problems. Here, it's recommended (but not required) that you get a check-up roughly every six months. I usually ignore that because I'm one of those horribly stubborn men who won't go to the doctor if I can possibly avoid it but I'm also on anti-depressent medication which requires a review every few months and my most recent review showed I had slightly high blood pressure. Because that was caught very early on, I can deal with it with a couple of fairly minor adjustments to my diet and lifestyle. Cost to the NHS: About fifteen minutes of the doctor's time to explain the changes I needed to make, no expenditure of drugs to deal with it. If you're sick and you have to pay for doctor's visits, you put them off as long as possible so when you finally do go to the doctor, you're sick as a dog and off work for weeks or even months. When doctor's visits are included in your taxes, you go as soon as you're sick and, in most cases, you're back at work by the end of the week.
Now, there's loads of different ways of funding universal healthcare. The UK, France and Germany all have entirely different funding mechanisms but the US is coming to this idea late in the game so there's nothing to stop the US from studying the existing methods and mix-and-matching parts, absorbing Medicare and Medicaid along the way, until you come up with something special and uniquely American. Morally, I don't think I need to justify universal healthcare here. Conservatives keep telling me that it's a bad idea because it would always be broke. I think they've missed the point. Of course it always broke! It's not supposed to turn a profit! You put money in and get healthcare out, that's how it's supposed to work. Then they tell me it can't work because government can't do anything right. Guys, the entirety of the rest of the civilised world manages this in some form. We can debate the particular methods in various ways but is the USA really so uncivilised that it can't even manage to build a working healthcare system? I don't think so. I think you have plenty of people who could set up and run such a system perfectly well. They will occasionally tell you that Europe is begging the US not to go down the road of "socialised medicine". They are lying to you. Every time some idiot here proposes abolishing the NHS, we shout them down and boot them out of office at the first opportunity. The NHS isn't perfect, don't get me wrong, there are problems but no corporate suit decides if you live or die.
Healthcare isn't "sexy". Politicians love posing with troops or battleships, they're "sexy". But healthcare is reliable, it saves lives day-in and day-out and it does so quietly, with minimal fuss. You have around forty million reasons you need a system like that and an economy to save.
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