No Healthcare. Undrinkable Water | Millions of Americans are Living in Third-World USA

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]The number of people who are living in third world conditions in the [music] United States is continuing to grow.

[00:00:06]There are millions and millions of Americans that are living in [music] places where they do not have adequate housing. They do not have adequate electricity. There's [music] no running water. They do not have access to medical care or grocery stores or [music] transportation.

[00:00:23]>> Martin County, Kentucky, the poverty rate is 48% [music] and the water undrinkable. So, is the water actually brown?

[00:00:30]>> Yeah. I won't drink it. Everybody drinks it, but they say it causes cancer.

[00:00:33]>> So, you're saying like you won't drink the tap water either?

[00:00:35]>> No.

[00:00:36]>> No, I won't drink it. It's been going on for 5 years, I'd say.

[00:00:39]>> Long time.

[00:00:40]>> And the water's like brown when it comes out the sink or what?

[00:00:42]>> Yeah. Yeah. We haven't turned it on yet.

[00:00:44]>> I got the lights water cut off.

[00:00:48]>> How do you get water?

[00:00:49]>> I curious. We got a spring hole about half a mile. We can bring it in the jug.

[00:00:55]So, how do you shower in the toes right there?

[00:00:58]>> There is continuing to be a wider and wider divide between the halves and the have nots. The people who have money and the people who don't have money. Right now, the top 1% own a vast majority of the wealth, while the bottom 50% own 2 and 12% of all the wealth in the United States. So there are some really wealthy people in the US, but that doesn't mean that the country as a whole is a wealthy country.

[00:01:28]>> Why are there so many who own so little and are paid so poorly in a country that has so much >> because many of us benefit from that situation. You know, I read the novelist Tommy Orange's first book, There There.

[00:01:44]And he has a line there that says, you know, kids are jumping out of the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths, and we think the problem is they're jumping, you know, and when I read that, I was like, man, that sounds like the poverty debate. You know, we constantly focus on the poor. We should be focusing on the fire, you know, who lit it, who's warming their hands by it.

[00:02:05]And I think that's a sentence that cuts through the complexity arguments. You know, some lives are made small so that others may grow. And that's just the plain truth of it.

[00:02:13]>> I know this from personal experience. I have lived in rural Appalachia.

[00:02:17]>> We are living in this camper that we bought for $1,800.

[00:02:21]>> I have experienced going without electricity and running water. We did not have access to healthcare.

[00:02:27]Healthcare in the US is very expensive and it's becoming more and more expensive over the years. I was born in the 80s and things have progressively been getting worse throughout my adult life to the point where my family actually decided to leave the United States and we are now living in a different country. So we have access to just our basic things.

[00:02:48]>> I lived in a third world country this last year. It was so dangerous. It was so scary. Oh my god. I woke up every single day being like, "Oh my god."

[00:02:55]Bucket showers, living off the land, understanding where my food's coming from, understanding the way of life. No, babes. America is a third world country. America is a third world country. I've been back for 3 months and my body is so inflamed.

[00:03:13]Anytime I walk into a grocery store, I don't even know what to pick because I know it's all toxic.

[00:03:19]Any interaction I have, I'm like, "Oh my god, you just want something from me."

[00:03:23]The only thing that's beneficial about America is the opportunities here. You have more opportunities here, but you have to give your soul for those opportunities. You don't experience life or balance. No, you have to give your soul to even experience a taste of those opportunities.

[00:03:40]>> Even if you live in the United States and you have never experienced a community that doesn't have access to these things, Americans have not traveled even within their country very much. They are very untraveled people.

[00:03:55]And so just because you haven't experienced this doesn't mean that it's not true. There are absolutely people who live in the United States who are living in, you know, trailers that are falling apart because they cannot afford anything else. I did a video recently on the ultrarocessed foods in the United States and how much additives and chemicals and just um unhealthy ingredients that these big companies are adding to our food. And a lot of people push back and say, "Well, just don't eat that stuff." I don't think that people understand that there are places in the United States, they are called food deserts. So there's no grocery store within an hour drive from these people's homes. So they would have to drive over an hour to get to a grocery store. And so there's usually little convenience stores, maybe like a Dollar General, a gas station in these communities where they're having to source all of their food except for, you know, some of the food that they might grow in their yard or, you know, some supplemental stuff.

[00:05:01]But they're getting the vast majority of their food from, you know, these dollar marts. And what do they have there? Like chips and soda and canned food. Just not very healthy options. Certainly like no produce. Everything is shelf stable.

[00:05:18]Poverty is expensive. And that's something else that I don't know how to explain to you if you haven't seen it or lived it firsthand. And also when you're talking about Appalachin poverty, it's also the fact that you almost can't escape it. If you're born into that, there's almost no way out. You're just stuck in the mountains. That's that's your reality. That's your life. And when we're talking about this subject, you also have to realize that, yeah, a lot of other areas do experience poverty, but they also have resources that the Appalachian Mountains typically do not have. Almost nowhere except for big cities like Lexington or Charleston or Huntington do you have any type of public transportation. Taxis, Uber, um buses, nothing. There is no public transportation in like 90% of Appalachia. You're 30 to 45 minutes away from a hospital. There are not food banks. Um they do pantries every now and then at churches, but it's mostly just boxes of like beans and rice. There's not food banks that you can walk into and like choose what you want like in other places or even good resources that can give you like dairy or meat or canned food that's not like garbanzo beans. Mostly what we get in our food pantries are things that people clear out of their pantries and they don't want and they don't eat so they give it to other people. There also are really no homeless shelters. If you go to the bigger cities, you know, like I mentioned, Charleston, Lexington, Louisville, things like, yeah, there's homeless shelters there, but in the smaller communities, in the smaller towns, smaller areas, they're simply not a thing. The homeless community can't even get food stamps because they require you to have an address to send the letters and stuff to for you to get food stamps. And if you don't have a shelter, if you don't have an address to use, then you just get no help. If you're unlucky enough to be born into circumstances that are completely beyond your control, then you're probably going to live like that for the rest of your life, unless you really fight to get out of it. Let's face it, you have to have some sort of money saved up to move out of state. If you're working paycheck to paycheck, barely scraping by or not scraping by at all, then you're not going to have the money that you need to move. So, you literally become stuck in the mountains and that's what you become accustomed to and that's what you become used to. I was born into extreme poverty and the only way that I was able to get out is because my dad lived in another state. So, we moved here and now my kids will not have the same lifestyle I had growing up. And also, what another thing people don't realize, you don't know you are in extreme poverty when you're in extreme poverty. This is a conversation I had yesterday. You don't realize when you're growing up poor that that's not normal. I grew up so poor that we couldn't afford to buy a 50 cent bottle of shampoo or conditioner or body wash or anything. I didn't realize that wasn't normal. Not everybody struggled like that because that's what I was used to. And I've sat back many times and been like, I'm so thankful that like my kids don't know that reality and they won't know that reality. But it is a fight like a fight for survival to get out of that situation. It's a lot harder to survive in those areas than people truly give the citizens credit for. They have no access to health care whatsoever. There's a lot of people that have major dental problems because they can't see a dentist and they've never been to a dentist in their entire life.

[00:08:45]Healthcare in the United States is a pay-to-play game and a lot of people do not have access to affordable health care. And so there are people that are literally dying because they cannot go to the doctor. This is not a rare thing or something that is extreme. It is something that is actually happening in the US. People do not go to the doctor to seek preventative care and they oftentimes don't go to get treated and even if they do go to get treated for some things they've waited to the point of no return. So they really can't get the help that they need and they end up [snorts] dying. And that is an actual reality of stuff that is going on whether or not we want to believe it. I know people firsthand who this has happened to. The highest growing demographic of homeless people in the United States are senior citizens. They are people who can no longer afford their home. Maybe they already own their home, but property taxes have increased so much that they cannot afford it.

[00:09:53]Maybe somebody's spouse has died and and they can no longer afford to pay for their home after their spouse has passed away. Often times, these people have worked their entire lives to pay into the social security system and are not getting enough money on social security to be able to pay their living expenses.

[00:10:12]You can't really live on $1,200 to $2,000 a month. If you're a single elderly person in the United States, it's really, really hard. So, these people are having to make the choice to move into their cars and become homeless. I work 6 to8 hours a week, 6 days a week.

[00:10:31]>> What's your shift from every day?

[00:10:32]>> 5 to 5, 5:00 a.m. to 5:00 in the evening. Working in coal mines, even if it's underground or on top of the ground, it's hard work. And you go out 10, 12 hours a day. If you go underground, you don't see daylight until the end of your shift. It's not an easy job. A lot of people don't understand it. If it wasn't for coal mines, a lot of these people around here would be starving to death. They wouldn't have electricity. They wouldn't have heat. And with people out here, everybody thinks we're just dumb country folk. But actually, a lot of us out here are smarter than a lot of people give us credit for. We work hard. We support our families.

[00:10:59]>> Shame on you and shame on me and shame on each and every one of us who haven't rattled the windows of these buildings with cries of outrage at a government that thinks their office furniture is worthy of $40,000 a year and families and children aren't. The current poverty guidelines are ridiculously out of touch. I have two jobs and a bachelor's degree and I struggle to make ends meet.

[00:11:22]The federal poverty guidelines say that I'm not poor, but I cashed in a jar full of change the other night so my daughter could attend a high school band competition with her bands.

[00:11:32]I can't go grocery shopping without a calculator. [music] I had to decide which bills not to pay to be here in this room today. [music] Believe me, I pulled myself up by the bootstraps so many damn times that I've ripped them off.

[00:11:44]>> Minimum wage in the United States has stayed the same for years. It is still 725 at a federal level. We're from Tennessee and that is the minimum wage in Tennessee. 725 an hour.

[00:11:57]>> There's something wrong in this country telling people it is okay to work three jobs, not see your kids, not see your loved ones, not take a vacation, and god forbid you get sick, okay? And I still got a job at home cuz I'm a mother. Cuz let's not forget, I don't get a day off.

[00:12:12]And I got to figure all that out. How we going to eat? How are we going to pay rent? How are we going to pay the utility bills? That every single thing went up after co. Not one thing stayed the same except salaries. The only thing that stayed the same in this country is the what? The minimum wage.

[00:12:26]>> Even though everything else went up, there is no scarcity. It is how do we pit people against each other so they're too distracted to see everything that I'm too addicted to consuming and how much profit I'm making and more profit.

[00:12:38]How many more houses one individual can have? How many yachts can one individual have? When people can be employed full-time and still not make a living wage, then that is a major problem. Most women are forced to go back to work very soon after their children are born, putting their kids into daycare and separating the family unit. There is no support for families. Child care is incredibly expensive and they're behind even a lot of lesser developed countries when it comes to family support and even infant and maternal mortality rates. The topic of maternity leave came up while I was having a conversation with a Polish man and the way he reacted to finding out that the US does not have maternity leave really speaks to how far behind this country is in comparison to many western and developing countries. He was telling me that him and his girlfriend have a six-month-old and she's been staying at home with a baby since it was born, which prompted me to ask how long maternity leave in Poland is. And so he explained to me that legally in Poland, women have to take 20 weeks off of work and if they'd like to go back to work earlier than that, then the rest of the maternity leave would transfer to the father. And that his girlfriend decided to take extra weeks off and her employer allowed it and has retained her a job for her. So, of course, naturally, he asked me what the US's maternity leave policy is, and I told him there was none. That in fact, after my mom gave birth to my 9B brother via C-section, she had to go back to work a week later.

[00:14:09]When I tell you guys that this man's jaw dropped, he could not believe what I was telling him. He was like, "What do you mean? Like, women are in such bad shape after they have birth. How is it possible that a woman can go back to work a week later after giving birth?

[00:14:22]What happens to her baby?" And I told him, "Well, the baby goes to daycare, a week old baby." And again, he could not believe what I was telling him. And then he kept on going after, "What do you mean a baby needs its mother the first few months, especially? How is it conceivable that a baby is spending 8 hours a day with a stranger? It should be home with its mother." And then I explained to him the concept of FMLA, which a woman can use in case her company doesn't offer maternity leave, but it's unpaid. a woman with a brand new baby taking time off of work to be with her baby. And that time off is not paid normalized in this country. By the way, even when I was living in Hungary, which is one of the poorest countries in the EU, Hungarian maternity leave blows the US out of the water. One of my Estonian friends has two kids and she got almost 2 years off of work paid to be with her babies. When I lived in Germany, the host families that I stayed with got stipens from the government to help them with their children, rich, poor, or otherwise. My friend who lives in Canada just had a baby, and she has maternity leave, and her boyfriend has paternity leave. So, they're both taking a year off together to be with their baby. Brazil has more maternity leave than the United States. And once again, Americans are going around with their low standards thinking that this country is normal, that it's the greatest country in the world. But when people find out what's actually going on in this country, it's unfathomable for them because this country is not actually normal. I think people would also be shocked to know that there are people in communities in areas of the US with no internet access. They are too rural for any companies to come and set up internet in certain communities because it's just not profitable. That's not something that the government does. They don't set up internet. And so, you know, certain communities don't have access to the internet cuz a lot of people like to say, "Well, they should just educate themselves."

[00:16:20]How? What are they supposed to do?

[00:16:22]>> In America today, child poverty has reached record levels with over 16 million children now affected.

[00:16:32]>> To us, it's just how we live. You don't get to make choices in how you live.

[00:16:39]One in 13 Americans is now unemployed and many children are growing up with little hope for their future.

[00:16:46]>> I'm surprised [music] by how things can change so fast. You can go from doing okay to going hungry and on the verge of being homeless again.

[00:16:57]>> And we're going to start with numbers one through 20. Food banks struggle to keep up with demand and homeless shelters have long waiting lists as even middle-income families sometimes lose their homes with just a few days notice.

[00:17:11]>> There is an inequality of education in lower inome areas. These schools are just not as high performing because in the US funding for schools is paid for through property taxes. So in lower inome areas, they get less money from the property taxes in that area to fund their school. This puts communities in a cycle of having their children grow up with a lack of education to be able to go out into the workforce to be able to better themselves. College in the US is also incredibly expensive. In most other countries, it is very affordable or even free. But in the US, it's tens of thousands of dollars to get a degree.

[00:17:57]Most people are graduating 30 to $40,000 in debt, which leaves them entering their adulthood at a disadvantage compared to people in other countries.

[00:18:08]And there will always be countries that you can compare the US to that have it worse. It's not about the US being the absolute worst country in the world. It is about the US being a developed country, a country that is supposed to be a global leader. But when the majority of the citizens in the country is not having their just very basic needs met, when they don't have access to health care or quality education at an affordable price or quality food or the security of growing old without ending up homeless, it is really important to me to continue to talk about these things because I still have friends and family who are living back in the US who are struggling. We're a third world country now. I'm an expert.

[00:18:55]I been to them.

[00:18:57]>> It's a little dog.

[00:18:58]>> You get Come on.

[00:19:01]>> I I ain't got to lie.

[00:19:03]>> Yeah. I had I had taking bath. I can't get my knees moving.

[00:19:09]>> Nice house.

[00:19:11]>> He got a kitchen. I got new.

[00:19:17]>> That's all right.

[00:19:20]My father was born in 193. I was born in 1959. He was 56 years old. And I asked him when he was 80 years old. I asked him, [laughter] I said, "Dad," I says, "you was born in 103." I said, "You've seen from horse and buggy to automobile to planes to rockets."

[00:19:40]I said, "What do you think?" He says, "Son," he said, "I was a kid yesterday.

[00:19:46]You bl you flip your fingers, that's how fast your life goes by. I'm going to ask you what the answer of this is. What is the smallest thing in the world that makes the biggest difference? The smallest thing in the whole it don't matter whatever you think the smallest thing. You tell me what you think. What smallest thing in the world makes the biggest difference? Attitude.

[00:20:11]Your attitude. In some Appalachin communities, households are spending far more than the national average share of income just to use the electricity. When the energy costs climb faster than wages, families are forced into impossible choices. Heat the house or buy groceries. Run the air conditioner or pay your water bill. Energy poverty is becoming a serious issue. A lot of people, they're not poor, but they're trapped paying electric bills to corporations that have monopolies, making people poor or keeping people poor. Most people in Appalachia and the United States don't have a choice about their electric company. Utilities operate as legal monopolies, and that means one company controls the power lines in your area. Customers can't switch providers the way that you can with the internet or sell service. If rates go up, households can't shop around for cheaper options. Now, combine that with a lot of other realities in Appalachin life. A lot of homes are older and they were built long before modern insulation standards. They lose heat in the winter, trap heat in the summer, which means that families have to use more electricity just to make the house livable and comfortable. At the same time, a lot of counties in Appalachia have lower median incomes than the national average. So when electric bills spike during a cold winter or a heat wave, those bills take up a much larger proportion of the household income than they would somewhere wealthier. That is what energy poverty looks like. It's not just one high electric bill. It's a system where the cost of basic electricity keeps rising while incomes stay the