Because the hierarchy of society that most politicians support demands employees who are terrified of leaving their exploitative jobs. Money is a powerful motivator, but even more powerful is the health of you and your family.

And at the same time, a very sick citizen does not generate economic benefits to them, so there’s no reason to make serious care available and/or not crushingly expensive. Better to drain as much as possible from them before the dead weight succumbs to those pressures than direct any revenue that could given back to “job creators” as tax breaks of subsidies.

It’s also why political and media personalities will brag about how quickly the county recovered from COVID. It wasn’t an economic miracle, it was sacrificing lives at the altar of capitalism. It went hand in hand with our absurdly disproportionate number of deaths.

Why we don’t storm their houses and string them up from lamp posts (or, I suppose, vote them out), I don’t know.