The fact that the United States doesn’t have Medicare for all gets a lot of attention, and we absolutely need to cover the 10% of Americans who don’t have health insurance.
But most (maybe 75%) Americans won’t see a major change if we get universal health care, besides an extra thousand dollars yearly. That would be nice but not revolutionary.
The quality of life metric in the US, where we do stink, is vacation time. The EU has a mandatory vacation time of 20 days (essentially 4 weeks or a month). Some countries go above this. The United States has a minimum of 0 days of paid leave. 0 days of paid sick leave. 0 days of paid parental leave. This bar is so low that unless you are something like a senior-level programmer, you probably don’t get more than 10 days of vacation per year, and you only get that if you are lucky.
Thanks to Obama, your pizza driver has health insurance as long as they work at least 20 hours a week. Could this be better? Sure. But most of these employees are covered by health care now. The place where working in America is behind the rest of the world is paid leave.
The market has spoken, and with concentration only worsening, paid vacation leave will not be covered by competition. Unions are generally anti-immigrant, and they are not coming back. The only way to get this done is through legislation.
From a simple calculation standpoint of how much effort it will take to get a reform vs how many people will be effected by this, implementing paid sick leave is probably one of the biggest bang per-buck reforms we can still get.
Politicians should look for reform that isn’t very controversial, improve the lives of practically every American, and improve their reelection ability. Mandatory paid sick, vacation, and parental leave up to EU standards is a slam-dunk victory.
I can back this up with data from Pew as well. Over 75% of Republicans support paid maternity leave and sick leave. 57% support paid paternal leave, 55% support workers to care for a family member. 90% of Democrats support maternal leave, 93% support sick leave, 79% support paternal leave, and 78% support caring for a family member.
Congress should listen and pass paid sick leave. Republicans (if any are listening), all of your representatives would rather give Biden a loss than give you something that the majority of you support. They are so hell-bent on getting back the Presidency that they will not compromise on anything, even when most of their voters will benefit from and support a policy. When a party puts electoral wins over serving constituents, that is when a party is unfit to govern.
There are very few issues with as much bipartisan support as this, and it’s hard to think of another policy that will benefit practically everyone in the country. It should be placed high on the Democratic Party’s platform as a clear sign that Democrats and Republicans are very different.