We live in a fast-paced, futuristic world where we have mechanisms in place that can feed millions of people in a day, where small pox and polio are unhappy memories of our parents, where fascism has been dead for so long that the generation that defeated it will soon be no more, where we can contact one another with phones that fit in our pockets and carry our entire collection of music inside a small and silly-looking white plastic doodad that becomes obsolete every six months. Yet with all of these wonders, we still can’t grasp the idea of health care for everybody, without needing to pay.

As America prematurely fires up for the distant 2008 presidential election, some politicians have started to realize Americans are tired of paying insurance companies that don’t cover them when they get sick or injured. There are Americans with teeth rotting out of their heads because their jobs give them no dental plan, who live perpetually in debt because of harsh injuries that require hospital stays costing thousands of dollars. Some go so far as to jump the border into Canada, where the same medicines produced at the same level of quality cost less than the outrageous prices here.

The Star wrote on this subject earlier this semester, but it is worth saying again: We are not the only ones who think we need universal health care, or even that our country is capable of doing it. Canada has done it, and it works. Candidates like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton support it. California Gov. Schwarzenegger introduced a plan for his state that is viable. Our own governor has worked toward instituting a similar plan for our state’s youth.

Universal health care is not an idea for crazy utopians. It is the next step in our nation’s progress, and a step which we are far behind the rest of the world in taking.