Health Care is a right in Canada and Great Britain - coverage must be expanded in the USA

Health care is a right!

• Canada has universal coverage:  Medicare is  the name of Canada's universal, publicly funded health-care system—known as Medicare—is a source of national pride, and a model of universal health coverage. It provides relatively equitable access to physician and hospital services through 13 provincial and territorial tax-funded public insurance plans.
• Great Britain: a state-funded system called the National Health Service, or NHS, which guarantees care for all. That means everything from ambulance rides and emergency room visits to long hospital stays, complex surgery, radiation and chemotherapy — are all free. They're paid for with payroll taxes.

Echo opinion letter published in the Daily Herald, a suburban Chicago newspaper:

Regardless of whether health insurance coverage as a mandate is constitutional, it is important to understand the underlying rationale behind it in order to realize the consequences, both explicit and implicit, of the absence of health care benefits. 

Fundamentally, by requiring almost everyone, including healthy individuals, to pay for and have health insurance through the enforcement of this tax penalty, the mandate seeks to protect the right to health care for those of us who get sick -- our families, friends, neighbors, co-workers and, most importantly, American community, notwithstanding whether we know them personally or not.

At a time where we are working tirelessly to expand access to health care, striking down the mandated coverage requirement and potentially the whole law without a proposed replacement, is expected to increase the number of people without adequate access even more. Most importantly, this resolution threatens the future of the people's fundamental right to health care -- the right ensuring that we will be taken care of when we get sick.

We now need to evoke government officials, whom we inherently elected to protect our rights, to find a serious solution that is sensitive to all Americans. During this important time, with the presidential election being just around the corner and Americans being more divided than ever, it is urgent to spread this message in order to fight for and protect our rights and democracy together.

From Anis Barmada,  Mount Prospect

Maine Writer- America has the resources to match the programs provided to the citizens of Canada and Great Britain!