With Gephardt out of the race and Kucinich going nowhere, universal, single payer health care is buried once again: its point to maintain a healthy nation as part and parcel of maintaining the nation's well-being as per existing social security for those sent out to pasture or for the millions of the ill-luck who are handicapped, or widowed with children did not need Harry and Louise this time to dump it. Once more in not espousing this principle, we defy the natural process, for the most part, of an enlightened nation. Further, the nation falls through the cracks in competing within a global economy because the morale and health of the worker and family are essential, but apparently only other developed nations are willing to pay for the precious entitlement to insure a highly motivated work force.


Before being hired by a large company or government, one must take a physical. The armed services want only the healthy: gays who do not falsify the psychology examination are rejected. There was a time the disabled were perceived as unhealthy and denied access to the work field until anti-discrimination law applied. Until the enactment of Medicaid and Medicare, the ill among the needy and the elderly were perceived as lepers. Most parents and all grandparents of senior citizens today had no such comfort as offered today — what short memories we have — but now it is perceived as an inalienable right. But God forbid that today's younger generations, oppressively taxed 14% of their gross income apart from income tax itself, should expect the protection of health care now, not just in their old age. No such financial obligation for today's golden oldies. Good old Lyndon handed it to them on a silver platter to insure against suffering and financial disaster in old age. True, since its inception the cost to seniors has risen, but in contrast to private insurance, modestly.


Every interest group that is already secure with plans — seniors, unions, government employees, and others lucky enough to be blest with good-will employers — ignobly failed to support Hillary's health care package, lest she tamper with existing plans in order to successfully obtain universal access to the 40 million Have-nots. The doomed outcome indicated that few who are comfortably in place with plans gained by choice employment or Uncle Sam are willing to pay more for their existing security to insure the same security for others.


Yet in a state of emergency like 9/11, hurricanes or floods, the sick and injured are cared for without regard to costs. Whether extracted from a mangled Lexus at the scene of an accident or rushed to the hospital from the bloody, drug-infested streets of L. A., one is suddenly perceived as equal. In the Fifties when Eisenhower had a heart attack, no taxpayer resented the medical bills. George, Barbara, Ronald and Nancy each was hospitalized and magnanimously America rose above pettiness. Then why be so resentful of others less fortunate? Many of the comfortable revel in nastiness, in self-righteousness. So what if universal access includes the pimp and prostitute, the child abandoned by parents, gay or straight with AIDS? — that's what universal means! When there is a shoot-out and the bloody drug criminals are rushed to emergency the county pays.


The frenzied pack against access defines national health as socialized medicine. One of our greatest presidents called it by that name — what's in a name if it gets the job done? But the problem is much deeper. The existing system — Hillary, Gephardt, Kucinich heroics notwithstanding — will ineluctably collapse and our children and their children will be without the primary act of Audrey Hepburn decency. How ironic, in an ostensibly enlightened nation that heard the cries of children across the seas and rebuilt Japan, Europe and later bestowed health care for the Somalians, Haitians, Bosnians, Kosovars, and now Iraqis, should turn deaf ear to its own. Be not holier than those of our own kind who are without, lest Audrey Hepburn rain tears from heaven.