A retired member of Congress finds where his favored policies are working

Roll Call-  Former Rep. Jim McDermott is the rare lawmaker who has been able to live out all the policies he worked for during his decades in Washington. He just had to move to another country to do it.From a quaint French village about 90 minutes outside of Bordeaux, the longtime liberal lawmaker enjoys free health care and a safe community where he doesn’t need to lock his doors at night. He loves that kids in the neighborhood don’t worry about gun violence and that women have access to reproductive care, specifically abortion. He reads the news every day but says he doesn’t miss America all that much.I spent 16 years in the Washington state legislature trying to get single-payer health care. Then I spent nearly 30 years in Congress trying to get single-payer. Then I came to France and in three months I had single-payer. Was that mind-blowing? You bet,” he says.

Leaving the country after nearly half a century of public service wasn’t necessarily the plan. After retiring from Congress in 2017, McDermott, feeling bored with his newfound freedom back in Seattle, decided to enroll in a two-week cooking class in the southwest of France. He liked the area so much he decided to buy a small stone cottage two weeks later and move across the Atlantic.

Today he calls himself an immigrant. He lives alone. He barely speaks French. But he’s a big fan of the French motto “Liberté, égalité, fraternité,” and says that communal spirit is evident both in his everyday interactions with his neighbors and how the French government treats its people. When he arrived in France, he needed to fill a few prescriptions but didn’t have a French primary care doctor. The pharmacist looked at his empty pill bottles and refilled them, no questions asked. When McDermott finally got a French physician, he received a brand-new CPAP machine at no cost. A month later, someone came to make sure it was working properly. “Coming to France is like a drink of cold water,” he says. “Once you’ve had this experience, it’s easy to see all the ways in the U.S. you’re getting screwed — well, not screwed per se, but definitely overcharged.”