I should begin by mentioning how grateful I am to the TPM community for digging into their bank accounts to send Gumbun and me to Washington. I'm certain I speak for her, too, when I say it is my profound honor to represent those here who fervently desire health care for all Americans.

I submit that until universal health care is adopted, costs will never be as low as they could be, the average medical outcome will never be as good as it could be, and we as a country will never be as moral as our history tells us we aspire to be.

In the 1954 case Brown v Board of Education, the notion of separate but equal education was refuted categorically. The U.S. Supreme Court held that separate school systems for black and white students were inherently unequal. I believe the same holds true for health care, in that separate systems of health care -- one for the poor, one for middle wage earners, one for the elderly and one for the gold-plated few -- inherently violate the equal protection clause of the Constitution.

While race hatred, court-ordered busing and taxation made the Brown ruling controversial long after desegregation became the law of the land, no issues of race or geography exist on which to base objections to universal health care. We would all be vested in the system to the same degree. The only major objection is the relative cost in taxation rates for rich vs poor. I will dispose of that objection later.

When one of my brothers was just a two-year-old toddler, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Fortunately, my father had health insurance for the whole family. Though my brother walks with an awkward, unbalanced gait, he still leads a productive life 50 years later. Not to say my family was unaffected financially.

Cancer, it seems, runs in my family. My maternal grandfather died of complications from colon cancer surgery. I remember him writhing in delirium the day before he died, moaning to be taken home from the French hospital he had already left decades ago during WWI. My father, who quit smoking more than 30 years ago, succumbed to lung cancer this year. My sister had a mastectomy a decade ago. I have Dupuytren's, a genetic disease of the hands with characteristics that some physicians say are similar to cancer.

I can tell you that every member of my family, whether stricken by cancer or not, has suffered emotionally and financially under its effects in the cause of assisting whichever of us needed help at the time.

In my own case, I have lost nearly all I have to my lack of insurance. When I worked for others, I sometimes had coverage through my employer. Sometimes not.

By the time I went to work for myself (11 years ago when my then-employer fired me after the onset of Dupuytren's), I could not afford health insurance. By then, my condition was a pre-existing one that only the most expensive insurance might have covered.

For nearly 10 years, I struggled to keep working, despite the progression of disease in my hand. By then, too, the pain of a crushed vertebra in my back -- which I have lived with every day since being catapulted through the hatch of my best friend's VW microbus in an accident when I was 20 -- had become nearly insufferable.

In early 2007, I halted production of my 18-time national award winning magazine for seniors, Ozarks Maturity. By fall of 2007, I was on Medicaid. About the same time, I underwent surgery on my right hand to straighten out the pinky finger that was curled to my palm and pointing elbow-ward. It took three months for the deep crosscut incisions in my palm to close.

But in a fluke that actually accelerated the disease and spread its involvement to the remaining digits of my right hand, the operation left so much scar tissue that my pinky now bends backward at the middle knuckle, leaving the small finger frozen into a Z shape. On top of that, I came out of surgery with nerve damage, so that my right hand -- my dominant hand -- feels as though it is literally, Joan of Arc-style, on fire and burning. Only a special medication alleviates the furnace-like sensation of immolation that would otherwise be spreading up my arm as I write this.

Loss of my hand led to loss of any hope to continue my occupation. It led to depression. It led to loss of my marriage. It led to what I consider incarceration in a one-room efficiency smaller than a standard garage.

I take 4 to 8 Tylenol every day, supplemented with Tramadol, for my back alone. In all, I am on ten different medications, eight of them prescription meds.

But nowadays my medication is largely paid for through Medicaid, as are my doctor visits and the hospital care I received during my surgery. Thank God it is so. If it were not, I would have ended my life by now just to escape unending, agonizing pain.

Why then do I fight for universal health care? Why am I making a fight for others my fight?

You see, I'm covered by the government, whose care makes my pain bearable and my life livable. Others are not so lucky. I myself once was not so lucky and got little of the care I needed to prevent future problems.

Insurance companies have not been my friend. They fought to avoid paying my medical bills after a car slammed into the rear of my friend's VW on those icy streets. They told me my Dupuytren's was not insurable when I was young and surgery might have turned out better. They placed a premium on my health so exorbitant that I was forced to pay it the only way I could: through a tax on my quality of life.

I have seen the dysfunction of our health care system firsthand, and it must end. I have seen the quality of care rendered by government-run programs, and it is superior to many and certainly to no care at all.

Ronald Reagan used to say in defense of his trickle-down economics that a rising tide lifts all boats. Most Republicans and even some Democrats say that leaving health care in the hands of private bureaucrats will benefit us all. Clearly, some of us have been waiting decades for the vaunted beneficence of the private insurance industry to kick in before we kick off.

Reagan was wrong about the rising tide lifting all boats. For one thing, some boats have already capsized and the dingies are taking on water faster than the cabin cruisers. Until we all rise and fall on the current beneath the same boat, some will always founder and drown by the time the lucky reach shore.

When our health care system is one system -- accountable to all of us and called to account by each of us because our own life depends on it -- then can we make our health care system as responsive and cost-effective as we want. We all will have the best of care at the lowest possible cost. And how bad could that care be if even Congressmen and Senators had to live by the same established rules of life and death?

When I hear people whine that they don't wish to support the health of others through their tax dollars, I can only laugh and shake my head.

Someone forgot to tell them life isn't always fair.