Between Michael Moore’s “Sicko,” and an election cycle in which the American people are naming healthcare as their number two issue (after the war in Iraq), American healthcare is about to undergo a long overdue and hopefully deep examination. If, however, all we do is focus on access to and payment for care — arguing, as Moore admirably does, for the elimination of private health insurance — then it is likely that the status quo will prevail, because the insurance companies will win that battle.

The insurance industry is a major contributor to and thus part-owner of the Congress. The men and women who make up the Senate and House are beholden to the industry for much of their financing yet, ironically enough, not for their own healthcare. Instead, all of the people who run the government (executive, legislative and judiciary) get their care through a government-run and -financed, single-payer, universal (for them) system.

We have to appreciate their conundrum when they get together to decide what to do about the rest of us — the fifty million who have no insurance at all, and many others who have the sort of tragically inadequate insurance that Moore highlights.

The only thing more depressing than listening to our political and pundit classes soundbite their ways around the subject of the war in Iraq without every addressing the core issue of America’s addiction to Middle Eastern oil, is listening to their plans to reform the American healthcare system. Blah, blah, yak, yak, nothing ever changes, and the core problem with healthcare in America is never mentioned:

And these health insurance companies are — they’re just — they’re the Halliburtons of the health industry. I mean, they really — they get away with murder. They charge whatever they want. There’s no government control. And frankly, we will not really fix our system until we remove these private insurance companies. I mean, they literally have to be eliminated. They cannot be allowed to exist in this country.