I started to make a long, detailed argument, but tonight I'll make a plea instead.  It's time we, as a nation, remembered that we are a nation, and not two opposing ideologies.  In the last two hundred years technologies and the U.S. population have expanded in ways our founding fathers simply didn't imagine.  It is way past the time when America should have had national comprehensive health care coverage, and the people who think we can't do that remind me of the historical arguments in favor of slavery as an economic necessity, for mass murder of the Indians, and against women's suffrage.

It's time and past to change the health care paradigm, and just as the rest of the civilized world had dropped slavery generations before the U.S. had a civil war over the issue, the rest of the first world has had comprehensive medical care for all of their citizens for some time.  Perfect systems?  No.  But while we spend twice as much on medical care as our neighbors, we aren't any healthier.  Fifteen percent of us don't have medical insurance because we can't afford it, and the 30% of our health care money that the insurance industry keeps, combined with the overhead caused by accounting for all of the arcana of excluding the undeserving from receiving health care, would easily pay for extending the benefits to everybody.

Let's treat healthcare as a right for all U.S. citizens.  It hurts us as a nation when we search for reasons to exclude the poor from medical security, and none of the nations who have nationalized health care are going broke because of their health care policies.  There are people who fear any sort of societal change, and label it with emotionally loaded terminology.  They are in the wrong on this argument.

I want my son and daughter to have health care plans when they grow up, even if they aren't millionaires.  Fifteen percent of us don't have health care plans now, and the costs continue to outstrip inflation.  It's only a matter of time before we're forced to stop pretending that our poorest fifteen percent are lazy spendthrifts, and rediscover that they are our neighbors and friends.  If we don't gain control of our spiraling health care system costs, then health care will be an option only for the wealthiest of us within a few decades.

The Affordable Care Act is only a bandage on the gaping wound that is our health care system, but it is a necessary one.  It's the first time that either of our major political parties has made a good faith effort to stem those costs.  It is not perfect.  But the 1993 Clinton administration health care reform plan is the last serious effort to create a health care plan, back in the halcyon days when total percentage of GDP for health coverage was 13.4%.  U.S. healthcare has gone up as percentage of GDP every year since 2000.  As of 2011, health care coverage costs 17.8% of the gross domestic product. The top 1% of Americans went from taking home 11.3% of the GDP in 1986 to 22.8% in 2007.  According to Huffington Post, that became 24% during 2010.  Median household incomes have generally dropped each year since 1997. I only report these bits to show that the excessive protection of the rights of the very wealthy that has been popular for the last several years is probably a bit misplaced.

I'm begging everybody who sees this blog, vote by whatever means you can in favor of the Affordable Care Act, and then force your politicians to start fixing the healthcare mess in real ways.  it isn't perfect, but if you've noticed that your income is flat over the last few years, you are probably being squeezed slowly out of the healthcare market.  Health care is a right by the same exact value as bearing arms, freedom of the press, and personal liberty - because people are willing to fight for it as a right.