Hope Street Group's Monique Nadeau submitted the following letter to the editor of the New York Times in response to an April 9 op-ed:

To the Editor:

    Forget universal health care coverage? Then you can forget the American Dream, too.

    Ramesh Ponnuru, in his April 9 op-ed ("The Misguided Quest for Universal Coverage"), is wrong to oppose the goal of universal access to health care coverage.

    While Mr. Ponnuru takes on the "practical, moral and political" cases for universal coverage, he ignores the most compelling case of all – the economic case. Hope Street Group, the non-partisan policy organization that I lead, has developed an Economic Opportunity Index (EOI) to show that the economic future of our people and our country depends on all of our citizens having access to health care coverage. The EOI demonstrates that health accounts for almost 25% of the total variation in economic opportunity.

    The author seems to imply that the only debate is about providing universal health care, unnecessarily raising costs. The fact is that controlling costs and improving quality are just as important, and are an integral part of all serious health reform discussions taking place in DC.

    To deny universal coverage -- and to ignore this opportunity to drastically remake the system -- is to deny millions of Americans the opportunity to lead healthy, productive lives and diminishes our country’s chance to regain its global competitiveness and widespread prosperity.

    Monique Nadeau
    Executive Director
    Hope Street Group

Access to quality health care and higher education is a fundamental human right to which all Americans should be entitled regardless of socioeconomic background, race, or gender.  Health and education are the most important drivers of economic opportunity in the United States according to Hope Street Group's Economic Opportunity Index, and yet our current system is set up in a way that essentially only allows those who are already benefiting from economic opportunity to profit from decent health care and education.

In their article, Viewpoint: Parallel crises in health care, higher education, Patrick Callan and Andrew Yarrow argue that this crisis is enormously dangerous to "a prosperous, optimistic American future" - but I would take their argument one step further and add that this crisis is detrimental to the survival of America as we know it, and the signs are beginning to show already.  The United States was a major force behind the creation of the global knowledge economy, and yet, compared to many industrialized countries, it is churning out one of the most ill-prepared workforces entering this economy.  If this continues, our nation will see an increasingly larger portion of future generations working harder and achieving less.  If we reach a point where hard work is no longer rewarded, we will in essence create a system that mimics an old arch-enemy that haunted our very existence during the Cold War.  Ironically, we continue to fight wars to protect our democracy from foreign influences, while our internal politics slowly chips away at the very foundations on which our democracy is based.

Our forefathers built a democracy on the intentional use of the word suffrage, signifying the right rather than the privilege to vote, and to maintain this great democracy our policymakers need to continue to build on our rights by including quality health and education.