“Doing the right thing” by trying to pay off bank debts can keep you stressed and on the edge of disaster for years. People who walk away from all debts at the same time usually recover their financial health much sooner.

Long story short: I was absent from the Internets for much of the last week due to a sudden, mysterious, and incredibly painful ailment that I thought was going to kill me. I ended up going to the hospital to get treatment after exhausting all other options, and am now on the hook for several thousand dollars’ worth of medical bills, because I had the bad luck to fall ill right in the void between insurance plans.

I want to use this story to illustrate why we need real, accept-no-substitutes health care reform, both as a cautionary tale and a call to arms. No matter how well-off you may be (or people think you may be), one accident, viral infection, bad piece of lettuce, or unexplained malady can put you in the poorhouse. Despite what demagogues and tools of the insurance industry would have you believe, health care in America is fundamentally broken, and not by the imagined hordes of immigrants or welfare recipients clogging up your local emergency room, but by a system that puts the needs and well-being of people far behind the motive for profit. And not just patients, but doctors, nurses, specialists, technicians, caseworkers, insurance brokers–EVERYONE who is part of our dysfunctional mess of a medical industry is burdened in some fashion.

The industry coalition that promised last week to help Obama cut healthcare costs by $2 trillion over 10 years is now stressing that their promise doesn’t commit them to taking any specific steps to achieve that goal each year–which is tantamount to saying that pledge was as empty as so many Media Consortium critics predicted.

Senators Max Baucus (D-MT) and Ted Kennedy (D-MA) have pledged to work together to produce healthcare reform legislation by June. If all goes according to plan, we could have a vote by early fall.

The prospects for healthcare reform in the Senate brightened appreciably this week with Al Franken being declared the winner of the Minnesota senate race and key Republicans making bipartisan overtures.