Simple message to our senators on health care bill: No

Alone among developed nations, the United States' approach to health care is a hodgepodge.

There is Medicare for our elderly and Medicaid for the very young, the poor and the disabled. The Department of Veterans Affairs serves the nation's finest and the Indian Health Service does the same for our Native American brothers and sisters.

For workers, the model we settled on after World War II relied upon employer-provided health insurance.

By the turn of the 21st century, changes in society were straining that model to its breaking point. Lifetime employment with one company was no longer realistic, yet changing jobs and insurance could expose families to devastating losses of coverage.

Medical bills became the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the U.S. as the number of Americans without coverage rose. Emergency room visits increased and those costs were being shifted to the rest of the system.

[Nothing is bigger for Alaska than this health care vote]

In 2006, then-Gov. Mitt Romney, with his Bain Capital market-driven instincts, teamed up with the Heritage Foundation (often called Ronald Reagan's think tank) and the Massachusetts Legislature to enact a law designed to cover all of that state's population with health insurance.

Soon afterward, policymakers in many other states, including Alaska, began to craft versions of that bill to fit the needs of their residents.

The central idea of what was then called RomneyCare was rooted in a classically conservative principle: Each person should be financially responsible for his or her own health care.

The role of government was to try to level the health insurance playing field through reforms, and to make private health insurance available to those without it at a reasonable cost. I'm not saying the idea was perfect, but it delivered measurable improvements, especially in reducing the number of uninsured Americans.

The elections of 2008 led to the introduction of a RomneyCare-type bill in the U.S. Congress. That bill's passage in March 2010 as the Affordable Care Act, aka "Obamacare," brought us to where we are today.

You can debate "Obamacare" all you want, but its conservative nature is a matter of history. Knowing this open secret of the pedigree of our current health care law helps make clearer the dilemma faced by House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., in 2017.

They can't accept "Obamacare" because of the last seven years of nasty politics, yet there is no further room to move further to the right on the health care spectrum, and not simply throw people to the wolves.

Which is exactly what the bill before the Senate does. Put simply, the question before our highest elected leaders is whether to tell millions of Americans to fend for themselves in the health-care wilderness.

[After vote delay, Murkowski and Sullivan remain noncommittal on health care bill]

That's wrong. It does not have to be this way. Health care may not be a right, in the same way as free speech or bearing arms, but most people would agree that health care is inextricably woven into human existence. Not as important, perhaps, as air, water and food, but still very, very important.

And just as we work to make clean air and clean water available to all, the nature of health care seems to call out for a similar approach: collective action to protect a collective good.

The bill being considered by the Senate does not advance the public interest in health care. The bill takes 50 years of progress and trades it for a tax cut for very wealthy Americans.

Write Alaska Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan. Call them, email them or speak to them in civil tones and tell them to say no. No, no, no. Tell them to go back to the drawing board and start again.

Hollis French represented West Anchorage in the state Senate from 2002-2014; in 2007 he filed legislation modeled after the 2006 RomneyCare bill.

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