Oh God, is there a king or queen of universal health care out there? So far, a few candidates have raised their scepters, but they seem to be using them to bang one another around temples, instead of hammering out a clear time-line for implementing a health care plan that will have an iota of a chance of passing both houses of Congress, before being declared dead-on-arrival, and buried under a pile bureaucratic minutiae, because it lacked adequate insurance for resuscitation.

Some things are inevitable: taxes, getting older and yes-eternal sleep. If you are privy to some unpublished discovery, where someone has stumbled upon a worm-hole to slide through when the bills are due, then you are truly in a world of your own. But if you are like the rest of us aging-children, then you are stuck in the same boring time-line and therefore you are like
everyone else who must pay the penalty for having worked hard to earn a living and now disdained for your wrinkled skin. Sadly it does not end there. After a lifetime of mailing your insurance premiums before the due date, you have to suffer the final indignity of having to pay someone to throw dirt in your face and wish you a final goodbye, thereby allowing you to reincarnate through the intestines of an earthworm and ultimately be
declared king of infinite space.

A few rich and clever Americans have found ways around paying their fair share of our growing national debt, and thanks to Botox and the skills of the cosmetic surgeon, there are some of us who have found a way of literally rewriting Newton's second law; i.e. gravity. Yes, it is becoming harder to tell who is getting older. But when it comes to health care, in some cases, it is almost impossible to discern a substantial difference between what each candidate for president in 2008 is promising. So after we blow away the smoke, let's take a closer look at the menu and concentrate on the salient points they are espousing to encourage you to yank the lever behind that gossamer curtain with their respected names on it.

First of all the issue of health care can be divided along party lines. As expected, Republicans historically known for their parsimony, do not embrace universal health care, but they are willing to give you some of your tax dollars back in the form of a credit, to defray the growing burden and nightmare of not being able to afford to stay healthy without drugs and regular checkups.

Lately, with much fanfare, we have the Democrats, who consider the working-poor and the middle-class to be their core constituency. Among the front-runners of the presidential hopefuls, we have Hilary Clinton, who failed to get her 1994 wish of universal health care, while husband Bill was playing doctor in the Oval Office. Undaunted, now she wants all Americans to
be required to have health-care coverage, whether it comes from their employers if possible, if not-then she expects her universal health care plan to take up the slack and provide a safety net for those who have fallen through the cracks. 

Staying on the same side of the aisle, we had John Edwards, whose
health-care plan is so similar to Hilary Clinton's one has to wonder if he is really hoping to be her choice for VP.

At last we come to Senator Barack Obama. It is obvious he is not running with the hope of being Clinton's mate; one needs only to look a Bill Clinton to see what that kind of closeness can do to one's hair color. The senator from Illinois has his sights on the big chair in the White House and not the Executive Office  Building from where Dick Cheney runs his fiefdom. Mr. Obama would like to see a universal health care plan in place, but he knows better than to alienate himself from big business, so he is opting to require only children be immediately covered under his plan, but he is promising to give us universal health care before he leaves office. He knows even the tight-fisted Republicans don't want to go on record as being so stingy as to deny a child a healthy start in life, so they can work longer hours and thereby reduce the costs to corporate America-the real GOP constituency, if you don't count 'Born-Again-Christians.'

There is one thing we can all count on in a probable Democratic administration: higher taxes to pay for all they are promising. But maybe that is not such a bad idea. It is certainly better than paying for the health care of the causalities of the Iraq war from both sides of the aisle.