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It has been over 40 years since Medicare, our last major healthcare reform, was enacted into law. A failure to enact universal healthcare now will embolden those who seek to obstruct real reform for many more years.

Healthcare for all Americans is mandated by our Constitution. The Preamble provides a key guiding principle: “promote the general welfare,” which is a framework for many other laws. We have enacted this principle when we created major legislation to protect human rights. We ended slavery, eliminated child labor, and gave women the right to vote. No one would seriously have believed that ending slavery for some was an adequate step toward total emancipation for all, or that eliminating child labor for most children would necessarily free all children from menial work, or that giving only some women the right to vote would be a clear route to universal suffrage.

Likewise, there is no partial path to universal healthcare unless we believe that the rights of some of us are not equal to those of others. Just as “we cannot endure half slave and half free,” we cannot be a viable nation when tens of millions lack health insurance.

To leave some Americans without access to healthcare also endangers the rest of us. If some are not covered, all are vulnerable. Infectious - and sometimes fatal - diseases once thought to be eradicated are on the rise, including mumps, measles, TB, MRSA, Hepatitis, and HIV. These conditions don’t ask if we have health insurance before they infect us and the cost of treating them exceeds 50 billion dollars per year. There also is a moral issue: over 20,000 people die every year in this country for lack of insurance.

Every major democracy – except ours – has determined that universal healthcare is a right. And although the systems in these countries – which include England, France, Japan, and even tiny Taiwan and Switzerland – are being continually refined, few would give them up. Their healthcare costs average less than half of ours per person, largely because of the efficiencies of a large, coordinated system including preventive care, sharing of information, avoiding duplication, and pre-set fees for each procedure. In our country the costs for any procedure – such as an MRI – can vary wildly. The process of determining who is covered is expensive in itself. 30% of our healthcare expenses go toward decision-makers who earn profits for their companies by denying healthcare, often to those who are too ill to fight back.

The members of Congress who have been most instrumental in blocking meaningful reform are those who receive the largest contributions from insurance and other health companies, despite claims that they oppose reform on principle. The bills currently being debated provide millions of new customers for insurance companies at government expense rather than cutting costs. Call or email your members of Congress today to tell them that they should support universal healthcare coverage. Ask them whether they work for us or the insurance companies. To find them, type in usa.gov.contact on the top of your computer screen. Now is the time to act.