Medicare for All is on the come up.

The pandemic put an exclamation mark on our broken healthcare system. Progressives in Congress are working to fix it … before it's too late.

(Photo by Probal Rashid/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Last Tuesday, the House Oversight Committee had the first hearings on Medicare for All in the 117th Congress, sponsored by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO). The hearings included testimony from patients, patient advocates, and healthcare experts. The conversation detailed the ways in which our system is broken — and why we cannot fix it without government power and commitment. 

In one particularly poignant exchange, Rep. Katie Porter engaged an expert witness on the bloated overhead of our current insurance system: “I support patients over paperwork,” she concluded.

Quickly after the hearings, Sen. Bernie Sanders announced another hearing in the Senate Budget Committee in May. “The function of a rational healthcare system is to provide healthcare to all in a cost-effective way—not to allow private insurance companies and private drug companies to make obscene levels of profit," he said.

After a healthcare-intensive presidential primary, which concluded in the election of not-a-fan-of-M4A Joe Biden, progressives in the House and Senate are finally rebuilding momentum for Medicare for All. It can’t come soon enough. Not only did the pandemic demonstrate how broken our healthcare system is, but it made it worse. And many of the trends it set in motion may be difficult to reverse.