Losing health care

An overwhelming 24 percent of Americans, roughly 40 million, are without health insurance.

The other 76 percent are faced with high premiums and run-of-the-mill HMOs.

The United States has the most costly, yet least effective health care system of all advanced industrialized countries.

Thirteen percent of the country's Gross Domestic Product is allotted to health and medical expenses. Next door in Canada, they spend only 9.5 percent of their GDP.

And they have a nationalized health care system.

Prescription drugs can be bought over-the-counter in nearby Mexico at a fraction of the cost of what pharmaceutical companies charge in the United States.

In 1992, President Clinton proposed a national overhaul of the health care system. Ninety percent of Americans polled at the time were unhappy with the system and favored reform.

Frightened and scared, lambasting change, the Health Insurance Association of America, the National Federation of Independent Businesses, the Pharmaceutical Companies of America and every other association affiliated with the profit-soaked medical field plastered the media with anti-reform ads and scared the wits out of an America that once supported reform.

For the sake of all the citizens who go without medical care, America needs a president who is more committed to ensuring change.