[mandmandam]

> The best I could come up with is "support for public healthcare"

... Wouldn't that be more than enough?

They can easily spend tens of billions on advertising, in order to make hundreds of billions. You'd expect them to; if they're allowed.

[gruez]

>... Wouldn't that be more than enough?

Did you stop reading right there and not the follow up sentence? The best example I could come up with doesn't past muster.

[mandmandam]

You've missed the point. The fact is, most of the US does support healthcare. That doesn't matter to the legislators. They have lobbyists convincing them to fight against any public option, they don't want to piss off their backers, or their club.

The reason US citizens are not more pissed off about being ignored, and shafted, is that the media don't bite the hand feeding them. They playact as if they do sometimes, but they know where their bread is buttered.

Media covers the worst abuses, but treats them like bad luck stories (no matter how obviously 'orphan crushing machine') rather than anything systemic and national.

Corporate media could cover a lot more of the tragic stories, and make people aware of the true statistics. They don't.

Instead, they ignore and attack poeple like Bernie Sanders for his healthcare plan, which would have saved the country money while providing better coverage. They do the same to anyone threatening the racket.

That's why your follow up sentence doesn't matter. Public opinion has been nearly completely disconnected from the levers of power, so it doesn't matter how public opinion changed after 1997.

[gruez]

> You've missed the point. The fact is, most of the US does support healthcare. That doesn't matter to the legislators. They have lobbyists convincing them to fight against any public option, they don't want to piss off their backers, or their club.

I'm not denying there's a disconnect between what americans say they want in surveys, and what legislators actually do. I am skeptical that this purely a post 1997 phenomena, as like your theory would suggest. I suspect this disconnect existed well before 1997. The oldest survey I could find on this topic was was this[1], which showed public support for federally provided healthcare at 64%. Sure, it only dates back to 2000, but barring some major national event, it's hard believe why public opinion u-turn in the years prior. Furthermore, most developed countries had public healthcare way before this. UK and France implemented public healthcare shortly after ww2. Canada had public healthcare by 1984. This wasn't something that was on the cusp of getting implemented, and the pharma industry shot it down after 1997. Public healthcare clearly wasn't something that was going to be implemented in the 90s or in the 2000s, with pharma intervention or not.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/FT_17...