WASHINGTON — More than halfway through a political season in which public concern about America's porous, confusing and costly health insurance system has consistently emerged as one of the chief worries of a squeezed electorate, this is what we can expect when the new president takes office next year: Not so much.
Neither presumptive Republican nominee John McCain nor Democrat Barack Obama, the presumptive nominee of his party, has pledged to cover all of the 47 million uninsured Americans who are falling through the cracks of a system that already is at a breaking point.
Neither has proposed a health-insurance plan that would make health care more fair and equitable by putting everyone in a pool in which risks are shared among those who are healthy (but might one day get sick) and those who are not. This is how insurance -- whether it be government insurance, such as Social Security, or private insurance, such as the policies we buy for automobiles -- works. With everyone in the same system, everyone shares the burden of paying as well as the benefit of coverage when it is needed.
Because of the crucial failure of both candidates to acknowledge this elemental truth, the nation will likely stay on the crooked path down which it has staggered since the employer-based system of care began to unravel at least two decades ago.
But don't both McCain and Obama say they want to fix the system, covering more people and lowering costs for everyone? Sure. But talk is cheap -- much cheaper, apparently, than the political costs of more comprehensive action that would either anger ideological supporters on the right (if you're McCain) or raise that old chestnut about "socialized medicine" (if you're Obama).