> I've never been able to understand how a parent could advocate against European-style healthcare goals
I'm pretty sure parental leave is not mentioned in the US Constitution nor in the founding documents of most countries.
If we don't have it today, it's not because people advocated against it and removed it, it's because we simply haven't had enough push to advocate for it and add it.
Large countries have a ton of inertia. Diverse, thinly populated countries even more so. When people are far apart, they care much more about local politics and their neighbors than they do centralized government. Making change happen at that scale is very very hard.
People living in European countries enjoy criticizing the US on stuff like this, but they fail to realize how much bigger and more spread out we are than they are. The US is more than twice as large as the entire EU. Our density is less than a third of the EU's.
Another comment here mentions Denmark. If Denmark was a US state, it would be 36th in size, smaller than more than half of all US states. In population, it has fewer than 20 other states. The metropolitan area of the city I live in (Seattle) alone has almost half the population of the entire country of Denmark. LA and surrounding environments contain more than two Denmarks worth of people.
Consider if every US state were to independently enter the EU. In that case, of the top 40 largest members by area, only 9 would still be in Europe.
The US is behind in many ways, but this is not because we are backwater full of regressive idiots. We are a very large country without the density and homogeneity to benefit from good economies of scale. It's a lot easier to reach consensus and move a government forward when you have fewer people and they can more easily relate to each other.
If you are unable to understand why we might not have attained the same healthcare goals as your country, consider that your inability to understand people whose situation is different from yours is the exact psychological problem that slows us down.