With health care rated as a very important issue for voters, we will certainly have many people pontificating on this issue with “socialism” included in a pejorative manner in their comments.

The first national health care system for a modern industrialized nation was proposed by one of Europe’s most conservative statesmen, Otto von Bismarck. His motivation came not from some Damascene conversion to liberal thinking but from an extension of conservatism in its truest sense. Bismarck recognized that if his nation was to be strong militarily and economically it would need healthy citizens.

The Labour (socialist) Party in Britain was prominent in pushing for their own national health care system, but they were joined by another staunch conservative, Winston Churchill. Socialists may have had a humanitarian motivation, but Churchill was more aligned with Bismarck in thinking of the national interest.

Germans continued Bismarck’s philosophy of concern for the health of people serving the nation’s interests by taking care of their soldiers in World War I. While Allied soldiers were wallowing in mud on the front lines, German soldiers stood guard on dry boards in their trenches. When they knew that at dawn on Nov. 11, 1918, an armistice would be signed at 11 a.m. that day, German generals honorably told their men to stand down unlike their British, French and American (Pershing and MacArthur) counterparts who senselessly and criminally ordered their troops to continue fighting — and dying — until a few minutes before the signing ceremonies. This oligarchic indifference for the people was part of American culture before WWI and continues to this day. Another form of this contempt for people takes place in the health care system consigning millions of people, including children, to an existence without resources for medical attention when needed and most economically effective.

As human nature often dictates, people with a lust for power attract the sheep-like masses and together they more often than not prevail over the remaining minority who still believe in the now apparently quaint concept of a right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and justice for all.

It would be to the credit of the United States if we were motivated by both humanitarian and conservative (in its truest sense) principles, but because our humanity is limited and self-interest tends to prevail, let’s consider this latter aspect.

Our present national system (if that is the right word) of health care clearly has nothing to do with socialism, so we can’t blame that politico-economic system for its incompetence and failures. As a recent article in The Bulletin about the schism between doctor groups and the hospital system indicated, a capitalist environment isn’t working all that well in the delivery of health care. In a World Health Organization Year 2000 report (www.who.int/whr/en) on national health systems around the world, France, which has alternated between socialist and conservative governments, was rated first in overall performance. Italy, with a variety of more chaotic governments, came in second. The United States came in 37th. Canada was 30th. Embargoed Cuba was 39th. Despite paying much less per capita for health care, all Western European nations, Japan and Australia had better ratings than the United States.

The point about high costs should come as no surprise when we consider how many corporations involved in the health care industries have a primary mission to maximize profits instead of the well-being of their customers. And, as should be obvious to anyone who has had medical care, the administrative costs related to health insurance plans must add up to a monumental waste. Then there are the legions of lobbyists converging on Congress that have to be paid for, but for corporations in the medical-pharmaceutical-insurance complex that is money well invested.

So the question for citizens content with the current system is, “What do we do about the tens of millions of uninsured?” Presumably, many of the former don’t care about the latter as human beings, but what about the negative impact they have on our national economy? Can we continue to afford the billions of dollars that are wasted with the current way of delivering (and not delivering) health care? How long can some of our business corporations survive with the burden of health care costs placed on them?