Americans have struggled through multiple presidential terms with concerns that the rest of the industrialized world has already fixed: Is health care a right or a privilege? Must medical services come with crushing costs for patients and their families? And should society provide a safety net to cushion the costs of getting sick?

In all other comparable countries, medical care is a right and nobody has to go bankrupt when they get really sick. Other countries have a variety of financing systems to take care of their residents, but no one gets cut out of the safety net.

In the United States, not so much...