Anyway, here’s how I look at this issue. Look at America’s political ideology over the last 100 years. Then see what an anomaly we’ve endured for the last 30 years. I say that because reforming health care delivery in America has been a bipartisan issue for 70 of the last 100 years. In that larger time frame, both Democratic AND Republican Presidents have supported the effort to improve how health care is delivered in America. Presidents from Teddy Roosevelt to Harry Truman to Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton have all supported this effort. More recently, Mitt Romney, a Republican governor in Massachusetts, helped create health insurance reform in that state — reform that is very similar to what was recently passed through Congress.

When I worked for Blue Cross, I learned that, the larger the pool of people covered, the better the rate for everyone. In the past, we’ve all paid for uninsured people — we’ve just paid for them in the most expensive way possible, at the ER, and often when they could have been treated earlier and had a better outcome if they had seen a general practitioner or specialist much earlier. Because we didn’t pay for the “stitch in time,” we paid later for the “nine” stitches in the ER — if the person even lived to get to the ER.

Medicare was VERY controversial when it was first passed. There were people then who thought it would lead to a government takeover of our health care system. (Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?) Yet today many Americans rely on this coverage. And I don’t see people on Medicare tearing up their Medicare cards because they can get better insurance rates through private insurers.

I think in a few years, we’ll look back on this time and think, “Wow! Can you believe there was a time in America when we thought it was okay to let people die because they didn’t have health care coverage?”