Let's be clear. The American people are increasingly tired of a healthcare system that works for Wall Street investors, insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry-but ignores their needs. They want real change, and poll after poll shows that they want to move toward a Medicare-for-all, single-payer system. And for good reason.

Today, the United States has the most expensive, inefficient, and bureaucratic healthcare system in the world. Despite the fact that we are the only major country on earth not to guarantee healthcare for all-and have 30 million uninsured and even more who are underinsured-we now spend more than twice as much per capita on healthcare as the average developed country.

According to a recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development analysis, we spend more than $10,300 per capita on healthcare. Meanwhile, Canada spends just $4,826, France spends $4,902, Germany spends $5,728, and the United Kingdom spends $4,264.

Further, despite this huge expenditure, which now constitutes almost 18% of our GDP, our healthcare outcomes are worse than most of these other countries. For example, our life expectancy is 2.5 years lower than Germany's and our mortality rate for children under the age of 19 is at the top of the list compared to other developed countries.

The ongoing failure of our healthcare system is directly attributable to the fact that-unique among major nations-it is primarily designed not to provide quality care to all in a cost-effective way. Instead, the system makes maximum profits for health insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry and medical equipment suppliers.

The Medicare-for-all legislation that I wrote, which now has 16 co-sponsors in the Senate, would provide comprehensive healthcare to every man, woman and child in our country-without out-of-pocket expenses. No more insurance premiums, deductibles or co-payments. Further, it would expand Medicare coverage to include dental and vision care. In other words, this plan would do exactly what should be done in a civilized and democratic society. It would allow all Americans, regardless of their income, to get the healthcare they need when they need it.

Under the current system, while thousands of Americans die each year because they lack access to the healthcare they desperately need, the top five health insurance companies last year made $21 billion in profits, led by the UnitedHealth Group, which made $10.56 billion.

As tens of thousands of American families face bankruptcy and financial ruin because of the outrageously high cost of healthcare, the CEOs of major insurance companies receive disgustingly high levels of compensation. According to Axios, in 2017, the CEO of UnitedHealth Group, Dave Wichmann, received $83.2 million; the CEO of Aetna, Mark Bertolini, received $58.7 million, and the CEO of Cigna, David Cordani, received $43.9 million.

Today, as an indication of how dysfunctional our current system is, about one out of every five Americans cannot afford to fill the prescriptions given to them by their doctors because we pay, by far, the highest price in the world for prescription drugs. A 2013 study showed that in 2010, the United States paid, on average, about double what was paid in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Switzerland for prescription drugs. Since 2014, the cost of 60 drugs commonly taken has more than doubled, and 20 of them have at least quadrupled in price.

While millions of Americans are unable to afford the medicine they desperately need, or are forced to cut their pills in half in order to save money, five top drug companies made over $50 billion in profits last year and, in 2015, 10 prescription drug CEOs made a combined $327 million in total compensation.

Would a Medicare-for-all healthcare system be expensive? Yes. But, while providing comprehensive healthcare for all, it would be significantly less costly than our current dysfunctional system because it would eliminate an enormous amount of the bureaucracy, administrative costs and misplaced priorities inherent in our current for-profit system.

Instead of doctors and nurses spending a significant part of their day filling out forms and arguing with insurance companies, they could be using their time to provide care to their patients. We'd be able to save up to $500 billion annually in billing and administrative costs. That money could be used to greatly expand primary care in this country and make certain that all Americans got the healthcare they needed when they needed it-saving billions on expensive emergency room care and hospital visits. Instead of paying the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs, we could save hundreds of billions over a 10 year period through tough negotiations with the drug companies.

The benefits of a Medicare-for-all, single-payer system are so obvious that even a recent study done by the right-wing Mercatus Center estimated that it would save Americans more than $2 trillion over a decade, reducing the projected cost of healthcare between 2022 and 2031 from $59.7 trillion to $57.6 trillion. Needless to say, that wasn't the point the study attempted to emphasize. Rather, the author of the study was hoping the headline-"Medicare for All costs the federal government $32.6 trillion" -would frighten the American people and get them to oppose it.

While opponents of Medicare for all focus their criticism on the increased taxes the American people will have to pay, they conveniently ignore the fact that ordinary people and businesses will no longer have to pay sky-high premiums, co-payments and deductibles for private health insurance.

At a time when healthcare in 2018 for a typical family of four with an employer-sponsored PPO plan now costs more than $28,000, according to the Milliman Medical Index, the reality is that a Medicare-for-all system would save the average family significant sums of money.

A recent study by RAND found that moving to a Medicare-for-all system in New York would save a family with an income of $185,000 or less about $3,000 a year, on average. Even the projections from the Mercatus Center suggest that the average American could save about $6,000 under Medicare for all over a 10-year period.

A Medicare-for-all system not only benefits individuals and families, it would benefit the business community. Small- and medium-sized businesses would be free to focus on their core business goals instead of wasting precious energy and resources navigating an incredibly complex system to provide health insurance to their employees.

Needless to say, there is huge opposition to this legislation from the powerful special interests that profit from the current wasteful system. The insurance companies, the drug companies, Wall Street and the Koch brothers will undoubtedly spend billions on lobbying, campaign contributions and television ads to defeat Medicare for all. But they are on the wrong side of history.

Here is the bottom line: If every major country on earth can guarantee healthcare to all and achieve better health outcomes, while spending substantially less per capita than we do, it is absurd for anyone to suggest that the United States of America cannot do the same.
(c) 2018 Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006 after serving 16 years in the House of Representatives. He is the longest serving independent member of Congress in American history. Elected Mayor of Burlington, Vt., by 10 votes in 1981, he served four terms. Before his 1990 election as Vermont's at-large member in Congress, Sanders lectured at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and at Hamilton College in upstate New York. Read more at his web site. Follow him on Twitter: @SenSanders or @BernieSanders

The schedulers for this coming week's Democratic National Committee meeting either have a sly sense of irony or a touch of historical amnesia. Why else would they set the DNC's most important vote in many years for Chicago on the day before the 50th anniversary of the start of the party's disastrous convention in that city?

The 1968 Democratic National Convention remains notorious mainly because of bloody clashes in the streets of downtown Chicago, where thousands of antiwar protesters encountered what a federal commission later called a "police riot." Passions were also fraught inside the convention hall. From the podium, Sen. Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut denounced "Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago."

But it's less well known today that much of the mayhem in the streets and the angry dissent inside the amphitheater a half-century ago stemmed from the well-grounded belief that the Democratic establishment had rigged the nominating process for its candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Many of the delegates for the two antiwar contenders at the convention, Sens. Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern, were incensed at the party's disregard for the will of the voters.

About 70 percent of the votes in the presidential primaries had gone to antiwar candidates, including Sen. Robert Kennedy, who was assassinated the night of his election victory in the California primary in early June. Yet the party conferred its nomination on Humphrey, a supporter of the still-escalating Vietnam War who had stayed out of the primaries - but still ended up with more than two-thirds of the delegates at the national convention. The undemocratic process deepened the divisions inside the party and weakened public support for its ticket, aiding Richard Nixon's narrow victory in the November 1968 election.

Since then, the Democratic Party's rules for selecting a presidential nominee have greatly improved. In 2016, voters in Democratic primaries and caucuses were able to choose 85 percent of the delegates to the national convention. But the other 15 percent were "superdelegates" - party officials and Democrats in Congress and state offices - who enabled Hillary Clinton to become the far-ahead front-runner in the delegate count well before a single voter had cast a ballot in the nomination contest.

By mid-November 2015, 11 weeks before any state primary or caucus, Clinton had already gained a public commitment of support from half of all the superdelegates - 359 out of 712. That boost from party insiders gave her a major lift with fundraising and burnished the media narrative of pre-primary inevitability. It was an advantage that angered many Bernie Sanders supporters (including me) who saw it as unfair.

Widely unpopular at the grassroots, the superdelegate system remains a burr in the donkey's saddle, threatening to further undermine party unity in the quest to regain the White House. Top DNC leaders seem to have recognized the problem, and the full DNC might be on the verge of fixing it.

At the Chicago meeting this week, the 447 members of the Democratic National Committee are scheduled to decide on the rules for selecting the 2020 presidential nominee. On the agenda, with strong support from DNC Chairman Tom Perez, is a proposal that would effectively eliminate the voting power of superdelegates on the first ballot for the nomination. (The party's national convention has not gone to a second ballot since 1952.)

The proposal has received almost unanimous support from the DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee, which is overwhelmingly dominated by party officials who backed Clinton in 2016. Sanders supporters are enthusiastic about the change. But significant pushback is underway from sectors of the party establishment. Some Democrats in Congress and a number of officials in state parties are now vocally making clear that they do not want to lose their superdelegate voting privileges.

Silicon Valley and the corporate media are far more effective in conjuring alternative realities than the chaotic Trump White House.

U.S. mass media have always lied. In particular, they have specialized in lying about Black people, who are the ultimate "Other" in U.S. society. Many a lynching was deliberately set in motion by a headline that went something like, "Black Buck Runs Amuk!" It is a new twist, however -- and a sign of profound disarray among the ruling class -- that a white racist billionaire U.S. president finds himself treated like the "Other" by most of the corporate media.

For more than two years the corporate media mob and its deep state nightriders have been trying to lynch Trump for proposing closer relations with Vladimir Putin's Russia - a liaison now deemed more taboo than miscegenation in Old Mississippi. Orange Buck Runs Amuk!

It is a battle royal, as the inveterate prevaricators of the U.S. press joust with Trump, a master of the Art of the Lie. The difference is, Trump lies to promote and protect himself, often without regard for even the interests of his class. He also commits the cardinal sin of failing to keep track of his lies, and contradicting himself.

Trump's defamations of nonwhite peoples and nations are not quite the same as lies, but reflect a diseased and delusional worldview shared by more than half the white population of the country. They, and he, actually believe that non-whites are incapable of self-government -- a premise that, for half a millennium, justified European rape and pillage of the planet. Ideologies, such as white supremacy and the (related) belief that the rich should rule, should not be confused with outright lies. You can't simply disprove ideologies; you must defeat the people and classes that profit from them.

Trump and his enemies in much of the rest of the ruling class, the Democratic Party, the corporate media and the national security (deep) state actually share the same ideologies, but are deeply conflicted on how best to sustain capitalism and global white supremacy. Trump's rise to national executive power and capture of the Republican Party -- an ascent largely engineered by his current nemeses in corporate media and the Democratic National Committee, who believed the Orange Oaf would be easy to beat -- has created a crisis of legitimacy for the U.S. ruling class. The anti-Trumps have gone quite nuts, fouling their own nest until it stinks to high heaven. In their frenzy, they have convinced themselves that The Donald represents an existential threat to the free flow of capital and the maintenance of U.S. global power.

They are determined to destroy the Frankenstein they created, but the monster refuses to die, knowing that there is no proof of the predicate crime of which he is accused -- "colluding" with Wikileaks and Russians to steal incriminating evidence against Hillary Clinton from the DNC. In the absence of proof, the anti-Trump faction of the ruling class and their minions in government, the corporate media and national security services have unleashed a tsunami of lies -- against Russia. They have even coerced oligarch Mark Zuckerberg to make his Facebook algorithms lie, to tip the scales against the sharing of allegedly Russia-tainted information.

Google seemed far more eager to collaborate with the national security state that gave it birth. Its algorithms speak consistently with forked tongue. Google employees are up in arms over having to collaborate in Chinese government censorship of the Internet, and have balked at helping the Pentagon's artificial intelligence schemes, but they have not protested the systematic marginalization of leftwing sites accused of sounding too much like "Russians," including Black Agenda Report.

Silicon Valley and the corporate media are far more effective in conjuring alternative realities than the chaotic Trump White House. Trump tells lies that are easily countered; the New York Times and Google erase facts from history, systematically. Trump will one day be gone, but the liars and censors of the corporate press and internet will be producing false versions of reality deep into the twilight of capitalist rule.

The deeper the crisis of capitalism, the worse the lies will get, and the further the United States will descend into an information bubble of conjured "facts" and beliefs that are rejected -- held in utter contempt -- by the rest of the planet. I'm not talking about the nonsense that buttresses "American exceptionalism," a two-bit cracker ideology that the non-white world recognizes as nothing but white settler hubris (even when preached by a Black U.S. president). I mean hard facts, the kind that erode the very legitimacy of oligarch rule -- such as the reality that China has already surpassed the United States economically, and that the center of the world economy has effectively shifted to East Asia. These are mega-facts that cannot be hidden. The U.S. is no longer a model for the world (if it ever was), and American rulers offer nothing to their own population but endless austerity, falling living standards, precarity and war. Someone must be blamed.

"Russian Buck Runs Amuk!"

I've recently received fundraising letters from Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Chuck Schumer on behalf of their Democratic Party's campaign committees. Mostly, all they ask for is money, though Schumer's letter includes a short tough letter to President Trump for us to sign which they promise to deliver to the White House.

Although politicians review and sign fundraising letters, rarely do they write them. That lucrative task is left to political consulting firms that also profitably consult for corporations. That's why the letters are so formulaic.

Over the years I have urged incumbents and candidates for elected office to do more than ask people for money. Why not ask them for their time, their minds, and their dedication by having "time-raisers," not just "fund-raisers"? Great idea they uniformly say. This never gets done. Their consultants think asking for anything other than money diminishes donations. So the dreary letters continue to arrive with grand promises and few specifics. For example, both letters mentioned the need for higher minimum wages. Wages have been stagnant for many years while corporate profits and executive bonuses have skyrocketed on the backs of millions of American workers. But there is no mention of how high a minimum wage (gutted by inflation since the 1970s) these Democrats are committed to supporting. Similarly, there are no specifics that address protecting health care, social security, reversing huge tax cuts to big business, debloating military budgets and stopping costly, reckless wars. If politicians don't give you specifics and timetables, they're creating their own loopholes should they be elected.

Now comes the spanking new "People's Budget" released by the House of Representatives Progressive Caucus of the Democratic Party (see "The People's Budget"). It is 40 pages with charts that rebuke and reject the cruel and vicious agenda of the corporatist, war-mongering, deficit-booming Republican toadies of Wall Street, and the fossil fuel and nuclear industries. The organized lobbies against the modest necessities of workers, consumers, and defenseless communities dominate the federal budget process.

But the CPC's "People's Budget" has its own infirmities. It doesn't address very weak corporate crime enforcement, to repealing specific anti-labor laws, like the Taft-Hartley Act, to being number-specific in cutting the bloated, corporate crime-ridden military budget, or even giving a number to a higher minimum wage.

Showing both large expenditures for restoring social safety net programs and large savings by reducing corporate welfare, restoring corporate taxes, and adding some new ones such as a speculation tax on Wall Street transactions, the "People's Budget" still comes off as a blizzard of funding for old programs with their welfare industries.

For example, the Progressive Caucus Budget does not recommend a universal basic income (UBI)-historically supported by liberal and conservative thinkers and politicians. UBI, in an age of rapid automation, would reduce the need for some of those welfare programs and bureaucracies.

The "People's Budget" goes into details explaining its health care policies, without even mentioning what it proposes to do about $350 billion in annual billing fraud and abuse by the health care vendors. Not a word about 5,000 or more lives lost every week in our country from preventable problems in hospitals, according to a recent Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine study. These are gigantic tragedies destroying peoples' lives, regardless of how important it is to provide affordable and accessible healthcare.

Although the "People's Budget" covers a myriad of needs, it is strangely minimalist on strengthening democracy besides stopping voter repression. Can you have a "People's Budget" without people power?

These Progressives should have included a section on "Shift of Power" from the few to the many, arguing for a fuller system of electoral reform, experiential civic skills training in schools, fundamental corporate reform (from corporate charters to corporate personhood), and giving people usable tools for democratic engagement.

A full-blown assault on the corporate destruction of freedom of contract (one-sided fine print) and the (tort) law of wrongful injuries should have come naturally to these Progressives. But it did not.

Timid on taking on corporate-induced deficits, quagmires of boomeranging Empire (though the "People's Budget" advocates for auditing the Pentagon) and the massive waste and loss of life from health care commercialism (that far less expensive single payer has avoided in Canada, with better outcomes), the Progressive Caucus report reads too much like a revised New Deal laundry list.

Its wonky style does not lend itself to on the ground campaigning before voters hungry for regaining control over their lives and looking for changes that restore self-reliant economies detached from the speculative risks and greed of the global corporate disorder.

People are essentially looking for fair play, empowerment, respect, voice, and reduction of the overall rat race that provokes so much anxiety, dread, and fear. They want time, yes time, for their families and other pursuits than sinking into deeper debts from distant forces way beyond their accountability. This "People's Budget," to gain traction, cannot be about "bread" alone. Thomas Jefferson understood the political economy, but he also knew the importance of non-material goals that connected the economy to "the pursuit of happiness."