(March 21, 2010) This is the day. Or at least, it could be the day that history is made in America. The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to vote on the fate of the health-care reform bill that's been the focal point of vociferous controversy ever since President Obama took office in January 2009.

As filmmaker Michael Moore reported in his latest documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story, President Franklin Roosevelt pleaded for a second bill of rights - which would have included unfettered access to health care - in his address to the nation in 1944. A few years later, after Roosevelt's death, President Truman specifically called for a system of government-backed health care. Through the years since, countless progressive voices have done likewise. Nearly all industrialized western nations have progressed far beyond words, actually setting up national health-care systems that cover all of their citizens.

But not the U.S., which stands alone among the major nations in shunning any form of government-backed health care for its citizens. Medicare, enacted in the Sixties, provides such coverage for older Americans. Impoverished families can be covered under Medicaid. But all the others have been on their own, relying on health-insurance policies provided by their employers or attempting to buy individual policies on the open market.

A few decades ago, when health-insurance companies began their rise to financial dominance, the system worked reasonably well. Most Americans worked for large companies that provided health insurance as a fringe benefit, either free or for minimal cost. Those without employer-provided coverage could find policies that were expensive, but not necessarily impossible to purchase. Or, they simply took a chance, going without insurance.

The good years didn't last long. Soon, the number of employers offering the benefit of health insurance began its steady decline. At the same time, premium costs for buyers of individual policies suffered a long succession of sharp increases. Eventually, it became clear that insurance companies weren't simply trying to make more money by raising premium costs. Rather, they wanted to boot "undesirable" policyholders off the rolls entirely.

Who were these undesirables? Anyone who might actually make a claim on his or her health policy. Insurers, both directly and surreptiously, were engaged in the process of "cherry picking," striving to shrink their lists of policyholders to include only people who were well, and likely to remain that way. Anyone deemed risky - likely to become ill or need surgery - had to be weeded out.

The financial debacle of 2008-10 made matters worse. As more workers lost their jobs, their health coverage also disappeared. The culprit is clear: Health insurance providers, in their incessant lust for unconscionable profits, have played Roulette with the well-being of actual Americans. And they've done so with a rigged wheel, which guarantees that they win on every turn.

Yet, the Republicans and blue-dog conservative Democrats have employed every conceivable tactic to try and keep any level of reform from becoming law. Some have expressed sensible concern about the prospect of growing deficits (ignoring the monstrous deficits foisted upon the nation by the Bush Administration in its push toward war).

Far more often, what we've heard is simple fearmongering over the prospects of government-run "socialized medicine." Nonsensical claims that President Obama planned "death panels" that would encourage elderly Americans to end their lives, or that a government-backed system would deny treatment to Americans who are currently insured, managed to convince millions that the insurers are their friends, not their enemies. Even when a tiny touch of logic would demonstrate that reform was in everyone's best interest - apart from the insurance-company chieftains - the gullible were induced to believe that the present system must be preserved at all costs.

As Congressional voting days drew near, a growing number of political analysts - dismayed for months by the vehement opposition to any sort of reform - began to suggest that the controversy wasn't really about health care at all. Rather, it had a become a battle about government. "Tea Party" folks and other combative opponents appear to have a deep-seated hatred of government - especially the Federal government.

How else can anyone explain the absurd wails that insist any form of health care that involves the government amounts to turning the U.S. into a "socialist" nation? To any actual socialist, of course, such claims stretch far beyond ludicrous. Despite the frantic whining and screeching, President Obama is a centrist politician, leaning only ever so slightly to the left. His predecessor, in contrast, leaned far to the right on the political spectrum. Former vice-president Cheney pushed farther rightward yet, in stark contrast to current vice-president Joe Biden, who straddles the center line as a political dealmaker.

Charges of "socialism" and "communism" are hardly new in American political discourse. In the first decades of the 20th century, critics of progressive measures came up with "red" as a catchall accusation directed toward anyone whose views strayed even a hair past the centerline and into left-leaning territory. Senator Joe McCarthy, the best-known of the Red baiters until his fall from power in the mid-1950s, was but one of a line of right-wing zealots who imagined dangerous "reds" and "pinkos" in every corner, certain they were ready to destory American society by violent means. Richard Nixon began his political career as a leftist-attacking Congressman in the late 1940s. So did Robert Kennedy in the 1950s, in the employ of Senator McCarthy - despite Kennedy's Democratic credentials.

In reality, what health-care reform advocates seek today is a close cousin to Medicare - a system that has worked exceptionally well for senior citizens since its inception during the Johnson Administration, in the mid-1960s. Medicare can be - and is - criticized for failing to pay doctors and other medical practitioners adequately. Part of the bill put forth by the Democrats originally included a provision to reduce those payments even further, on the grounds of needing to reduce the federal deficit.

Anyone who's been without health coverage for a long period, uninsurable due to pre-existing conditions or other "risk" factors, knows the system isn't just flawed, it's utterly unfair and - face it - morally depraved.

How could this happen? How can a rational person believe everything the government does is evil, when the true evildoers sit smugly in their insurance-company executive suites, presiding over a nation that consigns its least-able citizens to the trash heap?

Not that the health care bill that's rolling into Congress is perfect. Far from it. Plenty of liberals are distressed by the degree to which the bill has been watered-down. Opponents managed to kill the prospect of a public option, which would provide true competition to the insurance industry and ease back their control of the system. Coverage would be extended to more than 30 million people who are now uninsured, but millions more will remain without coverage. The provision that prevents insurance companies from denying coverage due to pre-existing conditions won't fully take effect until 2014. Insurers are still free to raise premiums, which won't please policyholders who've seen their rates jump by 20, 40, and 60 percent in recent months.

As proponents insist, however, the bill in Congress is a start, and it's a lot better than nothing. If it doesn't pass, we can be sure health care will be off the table for decades to come, and the insurance companies will continue to enjoy unimpeded, blatantly excessive profits while millions of uninsured Americans face lives of fear and uncertainty, terrified by the thought of getting sick and, in many cases, clinging to jobs they detest simply because they don't want to lose that coverage. Is this the America we want for the 21st century? Or, are we finally ready to take a tiny step toward joining the rest of the industrialized world?

Note: This complete editorial on Health Care Reform is available to other publications. Please contact JF@tirekick.com for premission to republish.