The American Health Care System Is Breaking Under the Weight of Private Profit

The latest West Health-Gallup survey is a blunt instrument that exposes what many already feel: the American health care system is breaking under the weight of private profit. Released last month, the study finds that nearly half of U.S. adults worry they won’t be able to afford necessary medical care in the coming year, and one in five households reported being unable to pay for prescription medicine in the past three months. Another sobering point: about three in ten U.S. adults said that someone in their household went without needed medical care in the past year because they just couldn’t afford it. The report not only catalogs a nation’s growing healthcare anxiety, but maps how a market organized around extraction rather than care translates into everyday precarity for workers, elders, and the most vulnerable.

These findings, while arguably unsurprisingly, should unsettle anyone who believes markets allocate health equitably. Affordability and perceived value fall hardest on people with the least political power. Black and Hispanic communities, younger adults, and low-income households score far worse on West Health-Gallup’s affordability indices. The data also reveals that where you live materially shapes whether you can see a doctor, pay for a prescription, or avoid catastrophic medical debt. The lesson is simple and structural, showing that a system that ties access to employment, wealth, or private insurance will always produce geographic and racial stratification in health outcomes.

Labeling this a “market failure” suggests something has gone wrong, when in fact it reflects the system’s underlying logic; capital accumulates where regulation is thin and public goods are neglected, and the health-care sector is simply following that script. Hospitals consolidate to increase their leverage and protect their margins; pharmaceutical companies privatize publicly funded research and set prices untethered from production costs; insurers design plans that shift risk onto patients while maximizing revenue. None of this is accidental, as we’re often told, but is the predictable outcome of political arrangements that privilege corporate power and class interests. The West Health-Gallup findings make visible the human costs produced by these structures, tracing a ledger of suffering that results from the dynamics of capital and class power, not from what some wish to attribute to so-called ‘flaws’ within capitalism.

If the goal is to reduce suffering, to allow people to work without the constant fear of ruin from illness, then the solution is also structural.Universal, publicly financed health care is not a utopian fantasy but a necessary step in the collective reclaiming of social resources, organized as a public good rather than a commodity. A single-payer or Medicare for All system breaks the chain between income and access, stripping out the profit-driven middlemen and reorganizing health care as a publicly managed resource, distributed according to need rather than market logic. The moral argument here is clear, and the strategic argument is equally compelling. Countries that organize health care as a social good have better health outcomes and lower per capita spending, see for example: Canada, Turkey, Cuba, Uruguay, and Taiwan. The West Health-Gallup report’s indexing of value and affordability spots where the United States deviates from that pattern, and points directly to the policy levers that could correct course.

Skeptics claim sweeping reform is politically impossible, citing the entrenched power of insurers, pharmaceutical corporations, and hospital conglomerates that profit from the suffering of millionsThose objections are not baseless; they show where power is concentrated, yet political possibility is made, not given, and is forged through collective struggle and organized resistance. The labor movement, community groups, and progressive caucuses have shifted what is conceivable before. The West Health-Gallup data can be weaponized in that struggle. It can show voters in plain figures how much they pay, who is being left behind, and what the alternatives yield in other countries. Facts do not automatically translate into policy, but they sharpen the argument and make clear who benefits from the current arrangement. 

The choice before us is stark, yet it isn’t abstract or mystical. We can leave health care a site of private profit, where millions are excluded and policy is captured by corporate interests, or we can collectively decide that society exists to meet human needs rather than enrich shareholders. The West Health–Gallup report doesn’t claim to make that choice for us, but it strips away rhetoric to expose the material consequences of the system as it stands. For those of us on the left, this data should fuel strategy, organizing, and the cultivation of a public imagination capable of replacing market logic with social solidarity.

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