Quite contrary to what John McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis thinks, this election is most definitely about the issues. Sure, one could argue that it's more about energy policy, more about changing America’s standing in the world or bettering our schools and educational institutions - but health care policy is doubtless an important voter issue in this Presidential election.

Millions of people are uninsured. Rising health costs push total employment costs up and wages and benefits down. The result is lost profits and lost wages in addition to pointless risk, insecurity, and a flood of personal bankruptcies. That much everyone can agree on.

However, the disagreements arise when the question becomes: How do we solve the health care crisis? The Democratic Party’s platform takes the shape of Senator Barack Obama’s health care plan, a call for universal health care. The Republican Party’s response has been horror at the idea of universalizing and thus socializing the health care system. Senator McCain’s plan has been to “to restore control to the patients themselves.” Among the fine print in his plan, Senator John McCain proposes a big tax hike as the solution to our health-care crisis. His plan would raise taxes on workers who receive health benefits and encouraging their employers to drop coverage.

While there may be policy and implementation differences between the two plans, one thing is clear: providing affordable health care to all is an obligation of the government, and the new administration should implement some sort of universal health care.

There are multiple reasons for such an approach. While Michael Moore in his documentary Sicko explains very effectively that universal health care is feasible as evidenced by its success in other countries like Canada, France, and Cuba, he really doesn’t emphasize the moral obligation a government has to provide citizens with health care. There is another facet of health care policy that needs immediate redressing through a universal system. According to the Census Bureau's 2005 Current Population Survey (CPS), there were 45.8 million uninsured individuals in 2004, or 15.7% of the civilian non-institutionalized population. The 45.8 million uninsured are more likely to be in the working class and earn low wages. When one sixth of the population is just one illness away from death, the government has a moral obligation to correct this wrong.

The bigger and often bypassed issue is that not only do problems exist for individuals that don’t have health insurance, but comparable if not equal problems exist for individuals that do have it. Opponents of a system of universal health care argue that universal health care robs the individual of any freedom and borders on a socialist system. However, universal health care gives citizens one more facet of their life they can control: they can decide the ways in which their health is prioritized rather than allowing corporate heads to decide for them. As the Harvard Law Review explains, “Although few Americans may realize it, the present system of health care financing affords little, if any, role for public involvement in deciding major questions about aspects of health insurance.

Instead, the crucial decisions about health insurance are left to insurance companies and employers, both of whom increasingly use schemes to reduce or deny claims to sick or high risk people.” In such a system, health care consumers are reduced to passive recipients, largely beholden to whatever benefit packages profit seeking insurance companies devise and employers accept. A system of universal coverage, in contrast, presents people with the ability to influence the way health care is distributed through public dialog.

But let's not confuse pragmatism with blind optimism. We also know we have managerial problems with such a system. Yet throughout this debate, we've acknowledged these kinds of teething problems for exactly what they are: examples of mismanagement and not an overriding problem with the theory or the philosophy of universal health care. It is possible to have a private system of health care along with a public system, as evidenced by Switzerland, where the government provides health care by simply making it available, allowing a choice between private or public health care.

The major point of agreement should be that some sort of universal health care system must be implemented in order to maximize freedom and opportunities for all Americans, not just those who can afford it.