In a recent article in Newsweek Magazine, T.R. Reid the author of The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care, characterizes national health care systems as reflecting a nation’s basic cultural values. “The fundamental truth about health care in every country,” notes Princeton professor Uwe Reinhardt, “is that national values, national character, determine how each system works.” If this is the case, then the United States of America is certainly not a moral nation.

In the most prosperous democracy in the whole world, 45,000 people die annually because they lack access to health insurance. The number one cause of bankruptcy in America is health care expenses run amok. The U.S. is the only developed nation where medical bankruptcies occur. We like to call ourselves residents of the greatest nation on earth and yet we allow Americans to die at the rate of one every 12 minutes according to Harvard Medical School researchers. That number shocked me. I had heard previous guesstimates of 10-12,000 on the number of uninsured Americas that die because they can’t afford medical care. I got to thinking that even that much lower number is certainly morally repugnant and unacceptable. How many deaths are acceptable in this righteous nation? 

The Harvard Medical School study documented more deaths among the uninsured annually than kidney disease or drunk driving and homicide combined. Researchers say American adults age 64 and younger who lack health insurance have a 40% higher risk of death than those who have insurance coverage. Another study documented that Medicare costs are driven ever higher by folks who simply delay medical treatment until they reach age 65 and are eligible for the government run program. A similar study in 1993 found those without insurance had a 25% greater risk of death. The higher risk is because the number of uninsured has exploded. An estimated 46.3 million people in the United States lacked insurance coverage in 2008, that’s up from 45.7 million in 2007.

The most sickening comments I’ve heard recently are from elderly folks who seem to care more about protecting their own benefits than helping save lives by extending coverage to the uninsured. The GOP has fanned their fears by spreading rumors of Medicare cuts despite the fact that proposed legislation lowers costs to seniors.  For all the talk about rationing of health care under a government run plan, the United States is currently rationing health care by wealth. According to T.R. Reid “this seems natural to Americans; to the rest of the developed world, it looks immoral.”

I believe the issue of health care for all is a moral imperative. We as Americans stand at a cultural cross roads, we can turn toward the light and begin creating an equitable health care system for ALL Americans or we can maintain the status quo, allowing a small number of insurance companies to hold us hostage both financially and morally.

According to a new poll by the nonpartisan Consumers Union, “[m]any Americans have been putting off doctors’ visits, forgoing medical tests and taking expired medications to save money over the past year.” Fifty-one percent said they “faced difficult health care choices” during the same time period.