Finally, President Obama has found the right note on health care reform.

That note is compassion.

We elected Obama with a mandate to reform health care.

Until Obama gave his address to Congress, I was afraid that we were forgetting that real people suffer painful and horrific consequences because our health care system is so full of holes.

But Obama reminded us of that cruel fact.

“One man from Illinois lost his coverage in the middle of chemotherapy because his insurer found that he hadn’t reported gallstones that he didn’t even know about,” he told the joint session of Congress. “They delayed his treatment, and he died because of it. Another woman from Texas was about to get a double mastectomy when her insurance company canceled her policy because she forgot to declare a case of acne. By the time she had her insurance reinstated, her breast cancer had more than doubled in size. That is heartbreaking, it is wrong, and no one should be treated that way in the United States of America.”

This moral argument is unassailable, so the Republicans are going for the low blows filled with lies, distortions and personal attacks on Obama. They are protecting the unbridled corporate practices that have so often hurt decent hardworking people in the past.

But if American citizens assert themselves and demand real health care reform, these scare tactics won’t work.

Already, there appears to be some consensus in Congress that federal law should prohibit insurance companies from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and from rescinding policies once someone gets sick. The law should also stop corporations because their health expenses rise above a certain level.

The health care market is a dog-eat-dog place. If you never get sick, never catch a disease, work for the right company, never have a major accident or get injured in a disaster and have some money in a rather large nest egg, you will be fine. But if you really need health care for any reason, you will eventually have problems.

For too long we have lulled ourselves into believing that we have the best health care in the world because we have the most gadgets and the biggest hospitals. But the World Health Organization places the United States in 37th place in health care, behind not only advanced industrial nations but also such countries as Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominica, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Caught in the health care gap are millions of Americans. Our infant mortality rate is downright embarrassing. And for some minority groups, such as black men, life expectancy on average is roughly the same as for men in some nations in Africa.

The Census Bureau just announced that the number of Americans without health insurance is at an all-time high because of the loss of jobs during the recession.

The right speaks of death panels. We already have death panels. What else should we call it when patients’ insurance coverage is a key factor in determining the level of care, and when insurance company middle management and claims adjusters deny payment for lifesaving care?

We need to have compassion — the kind of compassion that allows Canadians, the Japanese, the French, the British and dozens of other nationalities to make it a priority to ensure that everyone in their nation can get health care.

We should do no less for people in our own country.

Starita Smith is a doctoral student and instructor in sociology at the University of North Texas in Denton. She is also an award-winning journalist formerly with the Austin American-Statesman and The Dispatch in Columbus, Ohio. She can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.