By Joseph Q. Jarvis | Published: 2 July 2026
Across 250 years of its history, what is the single biggest failure of the United States of America?
Every July 4, we Americans are fond of celebrating what is uniquely right about our country. Having just returned myself from a tour of the Normandy beaches where American lives were lost in the cause of world-wide freedom, I can join in the chorus of praise for American ingenuity, determination, leadership, and industry. American troops took the toughest assignments on D-Day. American leadership made the essential decisions. American industrial power equipped the international armed forces. The graves of American heroes crown the bluffs at Omaha Beach. The United States has for a century been the essential nation in the cause of liberty.
My feelings of pride for my nation, however, are muted this year. It is really unclear to me whether the US is any longer serving as that essential nation. We have become an unreliable ally. Our leadership is corrupt and self-serving. Our national economy seems to be a vanity project. How did we evolve as a nation from self-sacrifice to self-indulgence? What mistake led us to our current state of divisiveness within which has been exploited by a narcissistic minority?
I offer as my opinion that the singular failure of the US which has so weakened our national willpower is our failure to care for each other when sick or injured. After WWII, while other nations, including the nations that were our enemies during that conflict, were securing healthcare for all of their citizens, the United States failed to see the economic and social strength of a guarantee to care for its citizens during episodes of illness and injury. Over the 20th century, health care grew from a cottage industry to a massive endeavor, big enough, if properly handled, to bolster the economy of every single county in the country. The American populace enthusiastically supported all things health care, electing politicians who levied the world’s largest taxes to support world leading public institutions in public health, medical research, clinical education, and the delivery of health care. We built hospitals in every corner of the country, with public money. We educated the doctors and nurses who worked therein with public money. We invented new and better ways to care for the patients, with public money. And with public money we led the entire world in identifying and decreasing the threat of illness and injury everywhere.
But we made the mistake of allowing business interests to have a hold on the enterprise of health care. It started as what appeared to be a benign allowance of tax credits to employers for the purchase of health plans, originally intended as a short term solution to inflation during WWII. Eventually, however, this crack in the public interest blossomed into a health financing industry that ruthlessly rejects people who are in their hour of greatest need. Business interests only care about what makes the bottom line better, and paying for health care in rural America does not make for good profits. Likewise, that is true of inner city health care. The care of the poor, the sick, the elderly were all too expensive (meaning not profitable enough). They, too, were populations jettisoned by the burgeoning business of medicine. As a result, whole areas of the country were denied the benefits of the publicly paid for development of clinical science. Hospitals across rural America, many originally built with Hill-Burton federal funds, were closed, their patients abandoned, and left to suffer and die. Also dieing were the rural economies that no longer had the white collar incomes of health care professionals.
Rural America could see that their way of life was ending and they became angry. It is, in my opinion, that anger (which I have in an overly simplified fashion described) which drives much of the political opportunity for the narcissistic minority.
What is the evidence for how much anger our health care failure has created? Remember the shooting death of top UnitedHealthcare executive, Brian Thompson, about 18 months ago? Remember the response of the general public to that event? Here are a few quotes from back then:
“Thoughts and deductibles to the family.”
“Unfortunately my condolences are out-of-network.”
“I’m an ER nurse and the things I’ve seen dying patients get denied for by insurance makes me physically sick. I just can’t feel sympathy for him because of all those patients and their families.”
“I pay $1,300 a month for health insurance with an $8,000 deductible. When I finally reached that deductible, they denied my claims. He was making a million dollars a month.”
The author Joyce Carol Oates stated that this outpouring of negativity about health insurance “is better described as cries from the heart of a deeply wounded and betrayed country; hundreds of thousands of Americans shamelessly exploited by health-care insurers reacting to a single act f violence against just one of their multimillionaire executives.”
Ladies and gentlemen, plausibly 200,000 Americans prematurely lose their lives every year because of the dysfunction of American health care. 500,000 Americas are bankrupted by the cost of health care in the US every year, while elsewhere in the developed world NO ONE IS EVER DENIED THE CARE THEY NEED OR ARE BANKRUPTED BY ITS COST.
There is power in simply putting our hands on each other when someone is sick or injured. When we care for each other we will respect each other and find kindness flourishing among us. The way forward, or, actually, back to a place where America is the essential country, is for us to care for our fellow Americans. Our biggest mistake as a nation was to fail to be caring.
Learn more at View source at utahcares.health
Dr. Joseph Q. Jarvis is a public health physician, chair of the Utah Cares Political Issue Committee and author of several books, including The Purple World: Healing the Harm in American Health Care and What the Single Eye Sees: Faith, Hope, Charity, and the Pursuit of Discipleship.