Health care is the greatest engine of inequality in America.

Americans owe at least $220 billion in medical debt. They didn't overspend. They got sick. One diagnosis, one accident, one premature birth, and a family that did everything right goes underwater — while the people who can afford it never feel a thing. That's not a flaw in the system. That's the system: a machine that turns illness into poverty, running one direction, down onto the people who can least afford the fall. No other wealthy country does this to its own citizens. We chose it. We can choose differently.

Medicare for All is how. One program, everyone covered, no premiums, no networks, no surprise bill for the crime of being alive. Your coverage stops depending on your job, your zip code, or your luck. We already spend more per person on health care than any country on earth — enough to cover everyone, if we stop letting insurers skim it on the way through.

The cuts are already here.

This isn't a someday problem. The budget bill Congress passed in 2025 cut Medicaid by roughly $900 billion. Maryland alone stands to lose up to $2.7 billion a year — nearly a fifth of its Medicaid budget — and five Maryland hospitals are already on the list of those at risk of closing. Nearly one in four Marylanders is on Medicaid. Half of them are children.

In the western counties, where the hospital is often the only one for forty miles and the largest employer in town, a closure isn't an inconvenience. It's a death sentence with a commute. They cut the care and called it savings.

A home shouldn't be a luxury good.

Rent in Maryland is climbing faster than almost anywhere in the country — more than 7% in a single year. Wages didn't move like that. The gap gets paid in roommates, in longer commutes, in people priced out of the towns they grew up in. Part of it is supply: we don't build enough, and outdated zoning blocks what we could. Part of it is Wall Street, which turned starter homes into an asset class and outbids families with cash. Build more, zone smarter, and stop letting private equity treat the roof over your head as a portfolio play.

Child care costs more than college.

In Maryland, a year of infant care runs more than a year of in-state public college tuition. The federal government calls child care affordable at 7% of household income. No state in the country hits that mark — here it eats more than double that for a typical family, and close to half a single parent's paycheck. So a parent leaves the workforce, or the family goes into debt, or the kid goes without.

Universal child care ends the math problem: cap what families pay, fund the providers and the workers who do the work, and stop treating the raising of the next generation as a private burden.

Paid leave and a Child Tax Credit that counts.

The United States is the only wealthy nation on earth that guarantees its workers no paid family leave. None. You have a baby, you bury a parent, you get a diagnosis — and you choose between a paycheck and the people you love. Maryland passed its own leave law in 2022, then delayed it three times; benefits won't arrive until 2028. Finish it here, win it nationally. Same fight on the Child Tax Credit: the 2021 expansion drove child poverty to a record low, Congress let it lapse, and poverty snapped right back. The version on the books now hands the largest benefit to the richest families and nothing to the poorest — a children's credit that skips the poorest children. Restore the full, refundable credit.

No kid learns hungry.

Maryland fed every student free during the pandemic, and it worked — better attendance, better grades, less shame in the lunch line. Then the state let it lapse, and has tried and failed twice since to bring it back. Nine other states got it done. A child who skips lunch because the money ran out isn't a budget line. They're a kid who can't focus in fourth period.

Free breakfast and lunch for every student — in Maryland, and nationwide through the Universal School Meals Act. We can afford to feed children. We're choosing not to.