Speaking of clawbacks, if I buy subsidized individual health insurance on the exchange, and I get a raise in the middle of the year, then I no longer qualify for as large of a subsidy and I'm supposed to pay back the difference — as if I've done something wrong, as if I'm not doing my part — even though it's the fault of the United States for not having a single-payer system.

It's as though people with the power to implement a single-payer system, but who choose not to, are taking a moment to remind me that the expectation that people have in every other country, to have their health protected and cared for, is something that, for Americans, they are proud to deny.

How is this the greatest country in the world if the health care benefits are worse than every country in the world? How does the whole rest of humanity agree that health care is part of the social contract, but Americans are supposed to believe that there's something genius about the USA taking exception to that?

It's time for Democrats to make single-payer their issue. History will always study why the U.S. was the last in the world to do it, the way they'll always study why a revolutionary experiment in democracy begun the 18th century still had legal slavery in the 19th century.