I would love a source for this, because "rugged individualism" is the reason why US has the worst healthcare and homelessness of developed nations.
That's false by a large margin. The US rate of homelessness has been massively reduced over the past 20-30 years and is comparable to Austria.
The US homelessness rate is far below Sweden, France, Britain, Australia, Canada. It's also below the Netherlands.
The housing first program by the US worked exceptionally well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_...
If you're at serious risk of death you want to be in a US hospital. I hate the trend of conflating "access to affordable healthcare" with the actual healthcare itself.
It does seem to do a decent job of encouraging and rewarding entrepreneurism.
The pandemic creates challenges that are uniquely tuned to impact the American "rugged individualism" approach to problem solving that works well in most circumstances. Pandemic mitigation is a serious collective action problem (at the limit, it wouldn't take more than total isolation for four weeks to completely burn the virus out... And that's never going to happen in the United States, nor should anyone expect it to).