"I am a small-business owner and my wife is in law school ,so I have been purchasing health care for the two of us for three years. We are healthy, non-smokers, work out regularly. I just turned 30 while my wife is 28, so we are relatively young.

"When I purchased insurance, I compared dozens of plans and companies. We wanted health insurance that was more than just emergency insurance, so we picked a plan that was 'good,' meaning it did not have a ridiculous deductible and offered reasonable coverage, 80 percent of the cost was supposed to be covered. We pay about $250 a month so we expected that we were getting good coverage.

"When my wife started law school we moved from Texas to Durham. It was the middle of a heat wave and I developed chest pains while moving. I called my health insurance company to ask where I should go to find an in-network provider and they told me that there were no providers in the state of North Carolina. They then wanted my new address so they could send me a notice that they were going to cancel my policy.

"I went to the closest hospital I could find. I was kept in the hospital for three days. My health insurance did not cover even half of my costs since I was out-of-network and I ended up owing $5,000. Considering we had just taken out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans this year alone, we had no way of paying the bill. Now we have resorted to begging the hospital not to turn us over to collection agencies.

"Now we are stuck. My wife is on prescription allergy medications and if we switch providers they will not cover her prescription expenses since it would be considered a pre-existing condition. She could go off her meds for a few months after we switch insurance companies to get around the pre-existing condition problem, but she would be miserable during that time. We want to get health coverage with a maternity option but that is proving very difficult to find. Most insurance companies will not even offer it to us."

Bishop's story is not unique. It's the result of our failed decision to tether health coverage to the private market, and an insurance industry that routinely finds pretexts to discard you if you are sick and going to cost it money.

It makes you wonder why the presidential candidates continue to promote more reliance on the private insurers.

Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have presented comprehensive health-care proposals, but most of the fireworks have focused on their differing visions of who should be required to buy private health insurance. However, mandatory insurance is not universal health care, especially when the insurers can continue to charge as much as they want and continue to restrict care.

Sen. John McCain offers even less change from the dismal status quo, proposing tax credits to encourage the uninsured to buy insurance and no crackdown on the abuses that characterize the insurance industry.

And once-a-year tax credits are of little help to those already facing financial distress in an imploding economy and premiums that have soared 87 percent the past decade.

"We used to live in Canada and their health care was great," Bishop said. "We found out that the cost of drugs for us there was less than our co-pay here. Also we had to pay a tiny premium per month for health coverage, but we never had to wait for any treatment. We pay much more and wait significantly longer here in the U.S. for our care."

That's not the usual story you hear in the media about Canada, but it's the reality for a lot of people. They have a system in which you are not held hostage by the insurance giants, a system similar to what is in place in every other industrialized country. In the United States, it would look like an expanded and improved Medicare for all.

It guarantees everyone has quality health-care coverage, and it takes decisions about our health out of the hands of insurance companies and their built-in economic incentive to deny care.

Surely that's the real reform all Americans deserve.