Bernie Sanders has suspended his campaign. This marks the end not only of his latest run for president, but of a five-year battle for the future of the country.

Consistently, Sanders centered this fight around a call for single-payer health care — the only sane and moral alternative to a system of private-sector insurance profiteering that kills, bankrupts, and leaves untreated millions of Americans. The reforms he called for are taken for granted in most of the industrialized world; they are modest, eminently rational, and consistently popular.

And in recent months, we have seen just how necessary single-payer health care — and the socialist politics that drove the Sanders movement — really are. The United States has proven itself unusually vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping the globe, and the culprit is clear: capitalism. It is capitalism that has driven cuts to government pandemic response programs. It is capitalism that pressures government officials to scale back basic suppression measures and open the company back up to vulnerable workers. It is capitalism that has decimated our country’s capacity to manufacture basic medical equipment and supplies and to keep grocery shelves stocked. And it is capitalism that has left tens of millions of American uninsured, unemployed, and on the cliff of poverty in the face of this pandemic.