To make his point Mero advances a number of arguments often heard from the right. He argues other nations with some form of national health care are somehow shortchanging their citizens by offering inadequate care, that health care is a commodity and should be treated by health-care consumers as nothing more than another product they can choose to buy or not buy, and that charities can pick up the slack when it comes to the growing number of uninsured in this country.

First, with regard to the claim other nations with universal coverage offer sub-par care, statistics simply don't bear this out. Just about every western European country and Canada experience higher life expectancies and lower infant mortality rates than the United States. Cancer survival rates are about the same and in many cases higher than in the United States as well.

More Canadians report having a regular family physician than do Americans, and when you compare only insured Americans to Canadians there is no statistically significant difference between our two countries.

When it comes to treating health care as a commodity, or just another product on the market, the assumption is health care "consumers" have choices, when in fact they have few to none. When a health-care crisis arises, there is no time to go shopping for the cheapest hospital or specialist and the ability to pay is a moot point. If a patient requires emergency surgery he/she will have it done regardless of cost.

This fact is borne out by the huge number of Americans who choose to go bankrupt every year rather than avoid costly but necessary treatment.

Conversely, doctors and hospitals offering patients coupons for free heart surgery, appendectomies or other invasive procedures would be scoffed at by patients unless they happen to need the surgery at that time. Need, not price, drives people into the health-care system.

The market has little bearing on a person's decision to seek medical treatment, except to the extent it causes them to put it off until it cannot be avoided any longer. By this time the cost of treatment is usually far greater than would have been the case had they visited their physician much sooner.

Finally, while the many non-profit clinics offering care to those in need deserve our praise, these clinics simply cannot pick up the slack in a nation with 48 million uninsured and growing. This fact becomes especially evident during periods of economic downturn when the number of uninsured rise just as charitable donations decline.

Health care is a right, not a commodity. Furthermore, it is ironic that a nation whose leadership talks so much about establishing a "culture of life" allows more than 18,000 Americans a year to die due to lack of health-care coverage and requires the parents of uninsured children to hold yard sales and place donation buckets at corner markets to pay for life-saving care.

No one will dispute other nations have problems with their health-care systems. However, other nations at least attempt to treat patients according to medical need using a triage system that maximizes fairness in an attempt to better live up to the physician's oath to first do no harm.

The United States now rations health care based more on one's ability to pay and less on medical necessity, an inevitable consequence of treating health care as a business instead of a public health concern.

Medicine should be about the needs of the patient, not the stockholder. The market-based system we have established is by far the most expensive and least patient-oriented or "consumer-oriented" system in the industrialized world. Our failure to fix it is among the paramount moral and economic failures of our time.

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Craig Axford and Laura Bonham are co-chairs of the Utah Democratic Progressive Caucus.