“I Pretty Much Immediately Discovered How Bad American Health Care Was”
Journalist Libby Watson started a newsletter to document the horrors of the US's profit-driven health system. She spoke to us about the insurance industry’s windfall COVID-19 profits, Joe Biden’s phantom public option proposal, and how growing up with Britain's National Health Service made her experiences with America's grotesque system all the more enraging.
A patient has his vitals taken at the International Community Health Services on March 20, 2020 in Seattle, Washington. (Karen Ducey / Getty Images)
Libby Watson knows a thing or two about what’s ailing American health care. Based in Washington, DC, she covered it most recently at the New Republic, having also written on technology, politics, and campaign finance for Splinter, Gizmodo, and the Sunlight Foundation. Originally from Britain, her direct experience with socialized medicine — and America’s disastrous alternative to it — strongly inform her reporting on the chronic failure of the profit-driven model.
Late last year, she left the New Republic to found Sick Note: a Substack-based newsletter that combines original reporting with interviews on health, health care, and the bureaucratic labyrinths that await ordinary Americans who need to see a doctor. Jacobin spoke to Watson about Sick Note, her perspective on the US health care system under COVID-19, and the political future of health care reform as a new Democratic administration takes office.
Luke Savage
You were born in a country (the UK) that has had socialized medicine since a Labour government created it in 1948 but have been working in the American media for several years now — and even before starting Sick Note, you often had a focus on issues related to health care. How does having experienced life in a country that actually has universal health care informed your perspective on health care debates in the United States?
Libby Watson
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