It’s time for those of us in favor of progressive health care reform to speak out. Otherwise, much of the media will continue to act like we don’t exist.

Over the last month, with all the focus on those rude reactionaries yelling in the faces of elected officials at town hall meetings, you might get the mistaken impression that they represent the majority.

Not so.

When the reform effort began earlier this year, a CNN poll indicated that 62 percent of all respondents were in favor of universal health coverage. Nearly 70 percent, according to the same poll, were in favor of greater government intervention in the health care system.

Yet, somehow, these numbers got lost, and the people who held these views were by and large ignored in favor of the yellers at the town halls.

But the case for universal health care is a compelling one.

At the present time, more than 45 million Americans lack health coverage. That represents 15.3 percent of the population. Even more striking is the fact that 90 million Americans did not have health coverage for some portion of 2007 and 2008, according to a recent study by the National Coalition on Health Care.

Universal health care would solve this problem.

Those who do have health care are paying more and more for it. In the last 10 years, employer premiums have increased 119 percent, placing a strain on individuals and businesses.

Universal health care would solve this problem.

Systemwide, health care costs are escalating, and they are not sustainable. In 2007, $2.2 trillion was spent on health care. That is 16 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, and an increase of approximately 300 percent since 1990, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Universal health care would solve this problem too. It would eliminate the high costs of administering policies for many different insurance companies. And it would give the government the leverage to bargain bulk discounts with drug companies and other suppliers.

Some people say they don’t want the government involved in health care.

But in 2007, government-run plans such as Medicaid and Medicare and Veteran Affairs covered 83 million Americans. This is roughly 28 percent of the population. This demonstrates that government health care is already a major part of the United States and that millions of Americans are using it regularly and have used it regularly for years. What’s more, they have a highly favorable opinion of it.

Some elected officials, Democrats and Republicans, think that it is more important for them to be re-elected than it is for the country to achieve universal health coverage.

It isn’t.

Insurance companies are placing their claims to profit-making over Americans’ claim to health care as a right.

Many years ago, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. stated the issue well: “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane."

If we don’t pass real health care reform this time around, it will be a moral failure for the nation, and a tragedy we will soon regret.

Brian Gilmore, a poet and a lawyer, lives in Takoma Park, Md. He can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.