If one of us is sick, none of us are well.

Kansas, you are embarrassing your country. Seriously: do you care so little for your neighbors? Stop being heartless. This is inhumane.

Did Jesus sell insurance during his 'lost years,' or something? I must be missing something. I just can't understand why any Christian would support the current 'pay or die' system. Didn't He say 'care for the least among you as you care for me' or something like that?

In an age in which a single disease-carrying agent can potentially infect a new person on every continent in a day (diseases including Bird Flu (H1N1), communicable TB, Ebola, West Nile, etc, ad nauseum, no pun intended), if one of us is sick, none of us are well.

Get the facts about the issue already. Inform yourself. And call your congresspeople, Senators included. Now is the time.

If we hadn't implemented the Marshall Plan after WWII, we would never have experienced the phenomenal growth spurt of the 1950s and '60s. We prospered, because our neighbors prospered with our help. Think of affordable health care as a Marshall Plan for America. Without it, we -collectively, as a nation-- will suffer a slow death from a billion cuts.

Mark my words. Unless we all have guaranteed basic health care, I give us twenty years, at best, before the slow death begins.

And in the meantime, we'll have a war in our hemisphere to worry about. With no health care for civilians caught in the crossfire.

Just for fun, imagine a nation of Kansas, in which only the employed or wealthy could receive health care. Small businesses not large enough to afford health care plans for their owners' families would simply have to shut their doors. No entrepreneurship would be possible; no new businesses could be started by individuals, unless they were wealthy to begin with. Citizens not fortunate enough to get a good job would simply be out of luck, when their health went sour. In all my years in Kansas, only one employer ever offered me health care coverage.

First, I suspect we'd see life expectancy drop a decade or so, on the average. Infant mortality would almost certainly rise as well. But things would really get ugly in an epidemic. Those homeless people on the corner? They'd be disease vectors, on every major corner, as would every job-seeker, at every lively business. How long before children are exposed? And retirees, and other elderly people?