I strongly agree that Congress should be in the muck with the rest of us, and their pensions and healthcare should be based on what the upper 50% of government workers get, so they have to lift up at least a huge chunk of people to elevate themselves.

The government has created the EPA, which helps the average American pretty often. The CFPB fights for citizens against banks every day. FEMA responds to disasters and does a pretty decent job of improving people's lives in hard situations. NOAA is so good at weather forecasting that private companies want to block it from publishing the data that they give away freely so those companies can publish it. California is guaranteeing school kids will have food. There is a lot of good government does. They're currently taking care of everybody over 65 years old for medical care, so extending that down to 55 or 45 would be a good test pattern, but in the end, insurance companies need to go away because they are what inflates the numbers, and we need to buy our drugs from countries who don't allow shameless profiting on drugs like the USA does.