On Tuesday, the House Oversight Committee held its first hearing on Medicare for All since the start of the pandemic. Speakers included the lawyer and healthcare activist Ady Barkan, who was diagnosed with terminal ALS in 2016. He testified from his home using a computerized system that tracks his eye movements and turns them into spoken words.

Ady Barkan: “It’s shameful that in the richest country in the world, we choose to inflict so much suffering. Since that first hearing about Medicare for All, our country has been through the worst public health crisis in a century. The pandemic has revealed and exacerbated the existing inequalities in our profit-driven healthcare system. It has hit hardest on disabled people, poor people, Black, Latino and Indigenous people, and especially people who live at the intersections of these categories. And one out of three COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. are related to gaps in health insurance. Nearly a million Americans have already died from the coronavirus. How much more is necessary to shock our legislators into action?”