Since we all have a bit of spare time, it might interest you to know that sociologists were already writing books in this vein before the pandemic started. The one I’m most familiar and one of the most recents is Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild. The narrative of the book ends shortly after Trump was elected, and details the choices people made leading up to it (All of Hochschilds books are worth a read imo). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander covers so much ground when discussing how our economy, specifically the prison industrial complex, is set up in a way to disenfranchise people of color (related: Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis, it’s very short, here’s a pdf). On Healthcare specifically is The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care by T. R. Reid, it’s an older book but he details the American healthcare system and puts it in comparison to other countries. Double Standard: Social Policy in Europe and the United States by James W. Russell does the same thing, but focuses on all social policy
There’s a whole host of literature on the subject and, spoiler alert, most of it boils down 1) the requirements of capitalism, including the sowing of divisions between people, and relatedly, 2) the idea of American Exceptionalism. The latter is the myth you mentioned, and the former is the reason the myth is perpetuated by the elites. Who needs a system that looks like that of another country when ours is American and America is the Greatest? No, don’t mind that the man behind the curtain slowly taking away your rights as a human being and don’t think too hard about the doublespeak you’ve been taught since birth, just sacrifice everything for the all might dollar America and focus on the red, white, and blue razzle dazzle, and blame everyone but the capitalists for the fact that you can’t pay the electric bill again this month*
*note this largely applies to working class white Americans, black and native communities are more likely to have social awareness and historical cultures of activism, for obvious reasons, and Latinx communities are diverse to the point that making broad sweeping generalizations without specifying location/historical context is folly outside of a 101 textbook
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