by Pam Uher

Created on: March 27, 2007   Last Updated: June 19, 2009

America is the land of opportunity, but what about the opportunity to access affordable healthcare? Why have medical costs and doctors fees become so outrageous? Do you have healthcare insurance?

What does it cost you to be healthy - stay healthy - or return to health, once you get sick in America?

I believe the medical field and insurance companies have some explaining to do. The Hippocratic Oath was once a model for ethical behavior among healers. I wonder how many in the medical field even know what it means today. And that includes insurance brokers, agents and companies.

All people deserve equal opportunity to health care and most would pay a reasonable price to any doctor for care. Yet, what if you lose your job and your health benefits? What if your medical insurance runs out? What if you can not afford private payer health rates? What if you did not have the resources or cash to save your child, or even give your child a possible future through medical treatment?

That is a lot of "what if's" that are all to common for over 45 million Americans.

Once upon a time in America people took care of each other. If your neighbor's mother died you took food to the house and asked if there was anything you could do for them.

Once upon a time in America, when someone was injured another person would pick them up and take them down the street to the town doctor. It didn't matter if they had insurance or not!

Once upon a time in America politicians pledged to provide health care for all people, especially children at a reasonable cost that could have cost caps.

Once upon a time American medicine was affordable.

Once upon a time health services were a part of life, not a fringe benefit only the rich can now afford.

Perhaps this version of the Hypocratic Oath, I found is fitting in our present moment of debating the need for universal health insurance.

"I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant:

I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.

I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures [that] are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.

I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.

I will not be ashamed to say "I know not," nor will I fail

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