I am perplexed by decades-long hesitation on national health care and disease prevention in the U.S. This desire to change all began as long ago as the Truman presidency. At the very same time, when the UK came out of the war — broke — it established its universal health care. A simplistic explanation might be that the intractable Gold thinking and influence of insurance and drug companies has made politicians feel they couldn’t be very creative.

I don’t want to get into arguments of the left and right here. Let me put forward two realities that it would be hard to argue with. Most of us know uninsured people intimately or personally whose financial lives have been devastated by a single visit to an emergency room. I believe we are the only well developed nation in the world with such a faulty system.

The other reality is the “right” that insurance companies have to reject applicants for pre-existing conditions. How is that logical, fair, or compassionate? How simple it would be to legislate that insurance companies must accept — in some kind of rotation — all applicants who are willing or able to pay standard premiums. They do this for auto insurance. Why not for healthcare?

What’s required, in my view, is Green utilitarian thinking and Orange creativity and action. Our President is absolutely right about putting our best ideas together and acting right now. The fact that we’ve sidestepped and hedged and pussyfooted for 69 years since Truman’s ascendency is a national embarrassment.

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