“You can look at it as socialized medicine. But in the face of an outbreak, a pandemic, what’s your option?”

That’s how one of the most conservative Republicans in Congress described a new proposal under consideration by the Trump administration. The plan would pay hospital to test and treat uninsured coronavirus patients.

It shouldn’t take a pandemic to teach us that our current system is broken. More than half a million families go bankrupt each year—and 35,000 Americans die—because they can’t afford health care.

Those numbers are alarming enough. What this outbreak makes clear is that leaving 28 million Americans uninsured and 44 million underinsured imposes a steep price on all of us.

Covering the costs of testing and treatment hardly amounts to a government takeover of health care. Even under a universal, single-payer system—the model I support—the government would not be in the business of running the hospitals themselves.

But you wouldn’t know that if you listened to the critics. John Hickenlooper not only opposes Medicare for All; he compares such progressive priorities to “the discredited ideas of Karl Marx and Joseph Stalin.”

That’s outrageous.

As speaker of the Colorado House and as president of Mental Health Colorado, I took on the insurance industry—and won. We passed landmark laws to protect Colorado’s families from unreasonable delays and denials in the coverage of care.

Solving America’s health care crisis will require the same kind of leadership. That won’t come from right-wing politicians—or from Democrats who parrot them.

Andrew Romanoff