By Joseph Q. Jarvis | Published: 14 October 2026
The United States of America has for decades now enjoyed the enviable position of leading economy in the world. We Americans are blessed by the confluence of opportunity, natural resources, freedom, and infrastructure within our national boundaries that makes our economic success possible. Very few now alive can remember the last time our nation was in really sorry financial shape, though of course we have had some bumps and grinds along the way.
That is not true for the citizens of the only other superpower to have survived World War II. The Soviet Union, now no longer in existence, competed hand and glove for dominance with the US for decades during the second half of the twentieth century during what became known as the Cold War. And then, suddenly, just around 1990, the Soviet Union economy suffered a terminal hit and that entire national superpower disappeared overnight, replaced by a second class country.
I have visited the nation which replaced the Soviet Union, known as Russia, a decade ago. I stayed in 5 cities and traveled by train and plane through most of the western or European parts of that nation. I had friendly conversations with a few dozen people in some of those cities, including Rostov, Volgograd, and Krasnodar. And I enjoyed visits to the major cities of St. Petersburg and Moscow. I am by no means an expert on economics or Russian commerce, but I have a few amateur observations about what life in Russia, a second class country, is like.
People there have trouble getting and keeping jobs, especially full time work that pays enough to survive and thrive as a family. Mostly they get by with gig work, cobbling together various salvage efforts, gardening, and harvesting what they can from nature. They are extremely thrifty at home, using and re-using everything, never leaving any waste. Local governments do not have the wherewithal to provide consistent services, such as zoning enforcement, construction code enforcement, snow and ice removal, traffic control, fire control and prevention, public transportation, decent roads and highways, and parks, libraries and museums. Russia does offer its citizens universal health care as far as the national budget allows. But with a per capita GDP that is 1/5 of the per person economic activity of the US, there is not enough of a tax base to really provide the infrastructure necessary for twenty first century life. After all is said and done, Russia is a second class country.
The video graphic embedded in this post below documents the size of the leading nations gross domestic products (GDPs) over the recent half century. As I already noted, the US leads the way during this entire time frame. Watch the ebb and flow of the GDP of the Soviet Union and then its sudden fall off of the list of leading nations, with Russia not reappearing for many years. Why did this happen to the Soviet Union?
I have a simplistic answer for that question. The Soviet Union failed to follow the advice Pres. Eisenhower gave the world during his presidency in the 1950s. They allowed the military industrial complex to skew their economy so much that other important functions (aside from defense) were terribly underfunded and neglected. A nation can not live by defense alone. So, once defense spending in the Soviet Union grew to 20% of the total GDP during the Afghanistan War in the 1980s, the entire economy collapsed, the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and the Russian nation fell into second class status, from which they have never recovered.
This review of Soviet failure is relevant to the US today because the US is now allowing its economy to be skewed in a dangerous way, albeit not by spending too much on defense. At no time since World War II has the US spent more than 5% of GDP on defense. We have listened to Pres. Eisenhower and kept the military industrial complex at bay. However, we have allowed the medical industrial complex to eat up more and more of our economy. Health care spending now swallows nearly 20% of American economic output. We are underfunding other vital sectors of our economy—food, housing, education, public transportation, and other infrastructure—in order to feed the endless appetite of for profit health care corporations (the medical industrial complex) for profits. We, too, no matter how big our economy is, can fall out of superpower status and into a permanent second class national existence if we do not curb health care spending.
The Utah Cares Political Issue Committee has carefully studied how to stop the relentless skewing of our economic power towards health care. Using what we have learned from these economic studies, we have fashioned a health reform proposal in the form of The Utah Cares Act. You can read the entire Act and the economic studies which back it up at View source at utahcares.health.
We make a bold assertion: The Utah Cares Act is the only proposal for health system reform that will actually reduce the percentage of GDP going to health care after implementation. All other proposals allow the medical industrial complex to continue to rob us of our economic future. We can not continue to exist as a leading economic nation if we do not change how we do health care business. The leading economic threat to our nation is not the federal debt, it is the rapid growth of health care costs eating up more and more of our national productivity without giving us any improvement in health.
Join us in the campaign to save our national economic prowess. Visit the website (View source at utahcares.health) and MAKE A DONATION to the campaign for better, simpler health care financed fairly for all. By doing so, you will save our nation’s productivity for your children and grandchildren. We do not need to follow the Soviet Union into second class national status.
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.