This is not to complain. Our ancestors, recent and ancient, took far greater risks. True, their health care cost relatively less, but it was also less effective. They died much younger than we, often lived out their lives with debilitating conditions – arthritis, heart disease, respiratory problems – and sometimes mortgaged or lost the family home or farm to pay for their treatment.

We’ve come a long way since then. We live longer, enjoy better health into old age, and rarely anymore dread visits to the dentist, except, perhaps, for the bill. But our method of paying for our care, as well as our justification for keeping it that way, remains stuck in the past. Millions of us are living with our fingers crossed or actually facing bankruptcy. And for some reason I’ve yet to fathom, millions of others with the assured means to procure and maintain private insurance, and millions more of us who enjoy government health insurance, giving a whole new meaning to the term, “golden years,” are unwilling to share our blessings with those less fortunate.

This in a country that by a huge percentage describes itself in polls as a “religious nation.” Now, I can read Scripture as well as most people, and can find nowhere – in the Old Testament, in the Qur’an, or in the New Testament – any justification for ignoring the desperate needs of so many people. In fact, all three faiths command liberal giving as a condition of righteousness. The disconnect between our profession and our performance is as shameful as it is baffling.

There are, of course, many secular arguments, as well, for extending health care insurance to all our citizens. Most obvious is the fact that, one way or another, all of us are already paying for the health care of everyone, insured or otherwise, who presents himself in need of it. But we pay far more than we otherwise might because the uninsured often wait till critical intervention is required, rather than monitor developing problems with a personal care provider. Another unfortunate scenario is described by New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof (Google his name for his recent compelling piece), in which the children of a parent dying of a genetic kidney disorder are afraid to be tested for the disease prior to donating a kidney, lest they be found to have a “preexisting condition” that would be a pretext for denying them private health care insurance to cover the procedure. If you thought Catch-22 was bizarre, you haven’t heard even a fraction of the stories generated by our dysfunctional system of health insurance.

Meanwhile, of course, the other industrialized countries, including what some of us condescendingly refer to as “Old Europe,” are doing just fine, thank you. Their citizens are living longer than we; they’re living without fear of losing their insurance; and, when I ask any of them what they think of our system, they just shake their heads, much the way they did when the United States Congress was spending $40 million to “investigate” fellatio in the Oval Office.

A few evangelical Christians regularly pop up on my Facebook page and usually argue the same points I hear on Fox Radio: that the avoidance of government intrusion and the fear of a “nanny state” take precedence over the needs of the uninsured poor. When I pointed out to one that the commandment Christ left behind him is, “Feed my sheep,” she opined that he was actually talking to the churches, not individuals. I felt like Barney Frank arguing with the dining room table, and didn’t bother to point out that there weren’t any churches at the beginning of the first century.

Whatever the Declaration of Independence may say, all of us are not created equal – except, perhaps, in the eyes of our creator. Even if we’re areligious, surely we can grasp that. And surely we can understand that our good old American sense of fair play demands that we look out for the less fortunate. In the October newsletter of St. Thomas Episcopal Church of Hanover, New Hampshire, appears an excellent argument by the rector, the Rev. Dr. Guy Collins, in favor of universal health care. A Brit himself, he has perhaps a better perspective. He writes in part, “One of the logical (or indeed theo-logical) consequences of creation in the image of God is that human beings should be treated fairly and equally. Whatever your own beliefs about the way health care is funded and disseminated, it is clear that the system is remarkably unfair. And it is unfair both to those who cannot afford basic preventative medicine and to those whose insurance disappears when they need it most....The true scandal of health care provision today is that we are besotted with a model of how to meet the needs of singular individuals. Instead, as Christians we should be arguing in public for a model that meets the needs of the whole human community, and not just those with significant economic clout.”

Many feel that Congress, in thrall to insurance and pharmaceutical corporations, can’t be relied upon to realize the change for which we recently voted. We hear every day the angry voices of those opposed. It’s time for the rest of us to demand our representatives do the right thing.