This is my speech from the Universal Healthcare Forum on Saturday 08/23/2025 at the Floyd County Central Library in New Albany, Indiana. The event was hosted by Brad Meyer, US Congressional candidate for Indiana District 9.
Full disclosure: I'm a member of Physicians for a National Health Program.
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I want to delve into a brief overview of the establishment of the British National Health Service. To fully understand this milestone, we must also consider the parallel developments in the US during the same period.
On January 6, 1941, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt described the Four Freedoms in his State of the Union address. He proposed four fundamental freedoms that people "everywhere in the world" ought to enjoy. They are:
- Freedom of speech and expression
- Freedom of worship
- Freedom from want
- Freedom from fear
In Britain, on June 10, 1941, a committee was announced which would survey Britain's existing national schemes of social insurance and their allied services.
On December 7, 1941, a pivotal moment in global history occurred. The day after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the US, previously neutral, entered the Second World War. This event would have profound implications for the UK and its social policies.
Almost a year later, Sir William Beveridge compiled the British survey results in a report called "Social Insurance and Allied Services", which was published on December 2, 1942, and is otherwise known as the "Beveridge Report".
The Beveridge Report, a visionary document, was tasked with imagining the shape of post-World War II reconstruction. It was underpinned by three guiding principles that set a new standard for social policy.
- Proposals for the future should not be limited by 'sectional interests', which refers to the narrow focus on specific groups or sectors. A 'revolutionary moment in the world's history is a time for revolutions, not for patching (or 'incrementalism'). I'm going to come back to this.
- The Beveridge Report clearly identified five major social evils - often referred to as the "five giants"—that must be addressed to forge a better post - war Britain. These giants are want (poverty), disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness.
- The report unequivocally advocated for social security policies to be a shared responsibility between the state and the individual. This collaborative approach guarantees that every citizen has a role in securing necessary services and contributions, thereby fostering a strong sense of collective responsibility.
The Beveridge Report was disseminated across the Atlantic and rigorously studied by both the US and UK governments. The US Social Security Board under FDR played a crucial role in this process, leading to FDR including the right to healthcare in his Second Bill of Rights in 1944.
Had FDR not passed away in 1945, Universal Healthcare could very well have been successfully implemented in the US, alongside Social Security and Medicare. Following his death, Eleanor Roosevelt took decisive action at the United Nations, ensuring that the right to healthcare was firmly established in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
The British Labour Party won the 1945 general election on a platform that promised to address Beveridge's five Giant Evils. The Beveridge Report's recommendations were implemented by the Minister of Health, Aneurin Bevan, through a series of Acts of Parliament (namely the National Insurance Act 1946, the National Assistance Act 1948, and the National Health Service Act 1946).
Despite resistance from opposition parties and the British Medical Association, the National Health Service Act 1946 came into effect on July 5, 1948, establishing the National Health Service, which provided free medical care at the point of need across the UK, regardless of an individual's wealth, and nationalized more than 2,500 hospitals within the United Kingdom.
It can be done.
Now we're going to skip ahead a bit. After the invasion of Iraq and the fall of Saddam Hussein, the Republicans under George Bush wrote the new Iraqi Constitution in 2005. They provided universal healthcare to all Iraqis, in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
But you still can't have it.
Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have any intention of giving you universal healthcare. We all know that Republicans lack any warmth or empathy and only see you as a piggy bank to extract wealth from for the 1%. But the Democrats aren’t any different.
To get elected in 2020, Joe Biden promised hedge fund managers that nothing would change - the rich would get richer, and the poor would get poorer - and that healthcare would stay the same - extracting premiums as much as $36,000 per family per year before anyone ever got to see a doctor. And, of course, those hedge fund managers would handsomely profit from their investments in private healthcare facilities and private healthcare insurers.
To give you an idea of the lack of political will here, Hillary Clinton's former staffers started a lobbyist firm in Washington, D.C., called the Partnership for America's Healthcare Future. Their mission statement is to saddle you with expensive private employer-based insurance and emphatically prevent you from receiving any kind of universal healthcare.
Of course, the health insurance companies also have their own trade association, called America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), which lobbies for the right to deny every single one of your medical claims and is behind some of the worst and most unconscionable aspects of Medicare Advantage.
Currently, the U.S. healthcare industry costs over 17% of GDP, and provides only partial coverage while under-insuring everyone. The true cost of universal healthcare is estimated to be between 7% and 9% of GDP. The difference reflects the wealth currently being extracted from your doctor-patient relationship. It’s unconscionable to put any shareholder’s interest before your personal health, and yet here we are.
The insurance industry is unlikely to lose any money by shutting down healthcare insurance. While there will be some restructuring, the industry will ultimately profit from it. Once healthcare premiums are eliminated and health insurance is no longer linked to employers, people will have more financial flexibility to afford life insurance premiums. Since life insurance policies typically do not pay out for decades, this would generate immediate profits for the insurance industry over and above that of healthcare insurance.
One of the questions that came up from the last universal health forum was the difference between the UK and US for women’s healthcare. So it’s time for a white male to mansplain abortion. Yeah. It’s that time of the month.
Historically, in the US, after Roe vs Wade, abortion only became contested because the religious right lost their fight to retain tax exempt status with the IRS over racial discrimination – as in whites-only segregated campuses - in their private schools and universities. So they had to pivot. The Roe decision was in 1973, two years after the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution, in 1971, calling for the legalization of abortion. But the first anti-abortion sermon by Jerry Falwell wasn’t until 1978, well after the IRS had already revoked Bob Jones university's tax exempt status, and five years after Roe.
But, here in 2025, now that Roe has been overturned, guess what? They’ve gone back to their old racist segregationist policies by weaponizing immigration and gerrymandering. Oh, yeah, the majority of those new districts that they want to create in Texas are gerrymandered to be 90% white, and are explicitly designed to dilute black and brown voices. It’s not just about picking up a few seats. This year’s gerrymandering by the Republicans is the electoral version of ethnic cleansing. And they want to do it here in Indiana too.
Back on topic. The Democrats could’ve codified Roe at any time. But they didn’t. Both the Democrats and Republicans fundraise on the issue, each raising millions of dollars which would be lost by an outright solution. This is why both parties are quite happy to continue to use the “abortion debate” to leverage their respective bases. It’s likely going to take another 50 years for the pendulum to swing back in Roe’s favor. Do you really want to wait that long?
So what’s the solution? In Britain, they have a comprehensive set of laws regulating abortion, starting with, are you ready, the Offences against the Person Act 1861, the Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929, the Abortion Act 1967, and the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990. These laws range from outright banning abortion (it’s called “destruction of a child”) to carving out all the medical exemptions you’d expect under the modern National Health Service. My wife and I experienced this exact situation when we lost a baby while we were in the UK. The NHS, it just works. You get the care and there’s no questions or cost at the point of delivery.
Now consider this critical question: What are you fighting for? Are you willing to invest all your energy in another grueling, 50-year struggle against ever-increasing healthcare premiums and medical costs for one small, but important, sectional healthcare interest? Or would you rather put all that energy into the security of universal healthcare, where quality care is accessible to all, no questions asked?
You all know exactly where we are now in US history. I don’t need to elaborate on that. From the time the Beveridge Report was published to the establishment of the National Health Service was only six years. But it didn’t take six years to build the NHS, it only took three, and that’s because the first three years were spent defeating Hitler and fascism. We already know what to do because we’ve done this before.
A revolutionary moment in history calls for revolutions, not just small adjustments or incremental changes. It is our responsibility to envision what once seemed impossible and to turn those visions into reality. We should make bold plans for universal healthcare, with no cost at the point of delivery, and remove any obstacles that stand in our way.
Thank you.
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