For years the Health Care Council has advocated for better access to health care for all Orange County residents. For years, we have conducted an outreach program for Healthy Families and children's MediCal, striving to reduce the numbers of uninsured children in Orange County. Since the onset of the long downturn in the economy over the past three years, we have seen many hard-working people lose their jobs, and find themselves no longer able to pay for the ever-rising costs of health insurance premiums for their families. As a result, there are now more children without health insurance than there were three years ago, when we thought we were beginning to make a dent in the problem.

Unlike Chicken Little, we don't think the sky is falling, but we keep telling anyone who'll listen that the health care system is falling apart. Now we see a rash of strikes with essential services disrupted because workers are afraid to lose health benefits. Half of all bankruptcies result from health care bills as more and more middle-class people descending into poverty. The fabric of our society is severely stressed, if not yet torn apart, in large part because we can't (or won't) solve the health care crisis.

The solution is universal health insurance. Not "socialized medicine" - just one big risk pool, with everybody in, and nobody left out. Of course, there would have to be some controls on the profits of health plans, hospital chains, and pharmaceutical manufacturers, and the insurance companies would be out of the health care business. Wouldn't that be just too bad?

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