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By Tony May

It's an old story long forgotten and suitable for telling in front of a roaring fire on a long winter's night.

Tony May

The year was 1991 and Harris Wofford, appointed to the U.S. Senate by Gov. Bob Casey to fill the vacancy created by the untimely death of Sen. John Heinz, was running in a special election to keep the seat.

His foe was formidable, former GOP Gov. Dick Thornburgh, who was just off a stint serving as the nation's Attorney General.

olls that summer had Thornburgh up 40 points over the liberal warrior, who had been an ally of Martin Luther King and had helped found the Peace Corps under Jack Kennedy.

Wofford's election gurus, James Carville and Paul Begala, needed a game-changer; they needed a miracle.

They needed a big idea - something that Pennsylvanians of all political stripes could unite behind.

They found their issue in national health care. As they would do with "It's the economy, stupid" in creating a mantra for the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, they put this dictum before the Pennsylvania voters in '91: "The Constitution says if you are charged with a crime, you have a right to a lawyer, you should also have a right to a doctor if you're sick."

Twenty-five years later, we've made progress - of a sort.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, nine out of 10 Americans have health care coverage today either through employer-hosted insurance, private coverage, Obamacare or Medicare and Medicaid and other government programs.

It's a vast improvement from 2012 - pre-Affordable Care Act - when an estimated 40 million Americans lacked health coverage.

Why aren't 10 out of 10 Americans protected? And why is Obamacare at risk?

Mainly because we got bogged down in the "how" to provide coverage for the greatest number with the smallest inconvenience to the status quo of the health care system, especially the financial side. The question of health care as a right was forgotten.

But Democrats, particularly, should remember now that they're down on their luck after losing the White House, that Wofford had hit on something: health care as a right.

It's an even deeper right than that of access to legal counsel.

School kids used to memorize the Preamble to the Constitution; it's covered there in the first, 52-word sentence:

"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union ... provide for the common defense [ and] promote the general welfare ..."

Traditionally, we have seen the "common defense" as protection against the foes foreign and domestic that we can see.

Two centuries ago, we didn't understand much about bacteria and viruses were unknown - but today we recognize health care as a constant state of war against them.

For those uncomfortable as seeing government's role in health care as "common defense," there is the catchall of "promote the general welfare."

When Obamacare was being crafted, pragmatists set aside the issue of health care rights because they were busy compromising and making concessions to hospitals, insurers, pharmaceutical companies and the whole range of professionals involved in healthcare delivery.

Instead of blanket coverage for all citizens regardless of race, heritage, ability to pay or station in life we got a patchwork quilt with some pretty sloppy stitching here and there.

Today, Obamacare is in danger. What its creators and its beneficiaries need to remember is what George Washington promulgated in defeating the British: the best defense is often a strong offense.

Health care needs to be discussed as a right, not a simple commercial transaction. At ground zero in the operating theater or in the clinic or where ever medicine is practiced, that's the way it works.

It's one of the reasons why people hold people in the health care delivery chain in such high esteem.

Getting in front of "the doctor," though involves gatekeepers and today, everyone is familiar with the phrase, "May I see your health care insurance card, please?"

Yes, universal health care - most likely a single payer scheme to end all such stuff - would disrupt the status quo.

But no more so than "getting rid of Obamacare on Day One" or Day 100 or whatever. And there will always be room for "Cadillac care" for those of means who think they're being made to wait too long for procedures and appointments.

Right now, the issue of health care access is turned upside down. People act as if they want and need 10 or 20 health care insurers to choose from; that they somehow are healthier because they, theoretically, can choose any doctor in the phone book to treat them; that they don't have to wait weeks for appointments with health care providers now; and, that they don't spend hours out of a day waiting in doctors' offices waiting to be seen for pre-scheduled visits because doctors - good doctors - almost always run late.

Health care is expensive; it's gone up under Obamacare.

But it's likely it would have gone up more without Obamacare because of uncompensated care - what it costs now to provide service to those who cannot pay.

A case can be made that there is lots of waste and duplication built into the current system. After all, we're talking about people's lives.

Better to waste a little money and not harm the patient. But no one can turn on a TV set and watch the bombardment of dozens of commercials every hour promoting one brand name prescription drug or another without the nagging feeling that, somehow, the viewers are paying for those messages promoting cures and nostrums that they can't buy without a doctor's prescription anyway.

Change is coming. The president-elect says so; members of Congress say so. Let's make sure the changes benefit citizens and taxpayers and not the special interests.