Health Care is an issue that is sometimes deeply interconnected with other issues that we care about, and I think that notion is reinforced in an article that appeared in the NY Times business section last week entitled Health's Gain may Be Army's Loss:

If the Democrats win the election this year, and are able to enact a health care plan that extends adequate coverage to all Americans, the loser could be the Army.

[...]

Michael Massing, writing in the April 3 issue of The New York Review of Books, tells the story of one part-time college student from Brooklyn, who was holding down two jobs but still going into debt. “Meanwhile, he got married, his wife got pregnant, and he had no health care. From a brother in the military, he had learned of the Army’s many benefits, and, visiting a recruiter, he heard about Tricare, the military’s generous health plan.” He enlisted.

It seems a bit perverse that the incentives for a young person with children to join are greater than the incentives for his childless friend. But that is the way it is. All that could change if the push for some kind of national health insurance program were to be successful.

There are myriad reasons to favor a national health care plan, and the idea that such a plan might make it more difficult to continue fighting unjust wars due to the lack of a health care incentive for recruitment serves as a reminder that the issues so many of us care about -- peace, health care, social justice -- are connected. Working to increase access to and the quality of health care for all residents does not take away from the other issues we care about, and in some ways can work toward the same goals.