18 Time April 6–13, 2020characteristic of Barkan’s life. In October 2016, he
and his wife Rachael Scarborough King were just set-
tling down. He was working at the Center for Popular
Democracy, she had secured a job as an En glish pro-
fessor at University of California, Santa Barbara, and
the two of them had a brand-new baby boy, Carl.
Then, out of the blue, Barkan was diagnosed
with ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. The disease has
already paralyzed him from the neck down, and at
some point it will take his life. His home is full of
the cruelties and contradictions of this reality: a
stocked bar cart in the corner of the kitchen is now
half hidden under boxes of medical gloves; the ac-
coutrements of his disease—feeding tubes a nd Clo-
rox wipes— coexist among kids’ toys. (Barkan and
King had a second child, Willow, last year.)
But if Barkan’s diagnosis was unforeseeable,
it also defined the trajectory of his life. By giving
him a front-row seat to the “moral abomination”
of the U.S. health care system, he says, it motivated
him in a way he might not otherwise have been.
In the past 3½ years, he has weaponized his entire
self—his mind, his story, his extraordinary per-
sonal challenges—to lobby and organize and advo-
cate for Medicare for All. Sixteen years ago, when
he met King at Columbia University, he was more
of an “institutionalist liberal,” King tells me—a de-
scription that causes him to playfully raise an eye-
brow: it’s clear that over the years Barkan’s politics
has moved to the left. A decade ago, when Con-
gress was debating the Affordable Care Act, Barkan
had hoped for a “public option” that would let peo-
ple choose a government insurance plan, but now
that’s not enough. It’s got to be Medicare for All,
he says: “Only a truly ambitious, radical departure
from the status quo that replaces the exploitative
for-profit model with one that guarantees health
care as a right for all” will fix the problem.
Barkan’s first brush with fa me came in Decem-
ber 2017, when a video of him confronting Senator
Jeff Flake about the Republican tax bill went viral,
earning him cable-news appearances, speaking en-
gagements and a massive audience. By April 2018,
he and Liz Ja ff, the Democratic strategist who had
filmed the encounter, launched his PAC, Be a Hero,
with two goals: to defeat Republicans in Congress
and to lobby for policies like Medicare for All.
Since then, Barkan has become a celebrity of the
progressive movement, touring 22 states ahead of
the 2018 midterms, being arrested at least seven
times on Capitol Hill, and preaching the gospel of
universal single-payer to his 156,000 Twitter fol-
lowers. In November, Barkan endorsed Elizabeth
Warren, and when she dropped out, he threw his
support behind Bernie Sanders.
Now that the Democratic Party appears to
be coalescing around former Vice President Joe
Biden, Barkan and his team at Be a Hero areiT’s a cool, clear Wednesday nighT in mid-
March, and Ady Barkan is at home in Santa Bar-
bara, Calif., hosting an emergency call with 3,2 00
supporters. As COVID-19 sweeps across the coun-
try, triggering emergency prohibitions and thou-
sands of hospitalizations, people are looking to
Barkan for leadership. But for a few long minutes,
the line is quiet. The technology on Barkan’s com-
puter that’s supposed to help him speak using his
eye movements isn’t working. He tries once, then
again, and after another minute of anxious silence,
Barkan’s synthetic voice suddenly fills the air. “Out
of this emergency, America will emerge a new na-
tion,” he says. “But in what direction will we go?”
While the point of this call is to catalyze im-
mediate action—to reach out to vulnerable people
during the crisis and demand aid from Congress —
these efforts are not divorced from Barkan’s un-
shakable long-term goal: passing Medicare for All.
It is his hope that the COVID-19 pandemic, in all
its hideous destruction, will expose the gaps in the
fragmented American health care system.
Already, it’s clear that the system is not work-
ing: those who lost their health insurance when
they lost their jobs are now facing a global health
catastrophe with neither an income nor access to
affordable health care. And without insurance,
people have every incentive to avoid medical care,
lest they be saddled with potentially tens of thou-
sands in hospital bills. Even those with good insur-
ance can expect to pay thousands in deductibles
and co-pays should they find themselves in the
emergency room. COVID-19 has not caused these
problems, but it has shone the spotlight on them—
which may, in some twisted way, Barkan says, offer
his movement an opportunity.
When all this is over, Barkan asks, “Will we slide
ever deeper into a nightmare of inequality, precar-
ity and social alienation? Or will we use this crisis
to begin to make the big structural changes that we
need to build a more just and equitable society?” As
he gets going, listeners post encouraging messages
and emojis in the conference’s chat window.
“The answer,” Barkan says, “depends in large
part on what we do in the coming days.”The abiliTy To pluck an opportunity from
disaster—or at least to refuse to allow calamity to
stand in the way of progress—is perhaps the definingHUMANIZING
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