Recently, a friend in his 50s died of a heart attack while watching TV. As bad as this made me feel, I became more upset after finding out that he knew he had a bad heart and needed an angioplasty, but had neither insurance nor money for the procedure. He was an out-of-work independent contractor and freelance musician who had worked his whole life.

When I saw Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., insist on TV recently that uninsured people can get necessary health care by going to an emergency room, I wanted to ask him whether he would like to drive himself to the hospital were he to have a heart attack.

Kyl was worried that premiums would go up if we had universal health care. With more people being out of work than ever, it is more timely than ever that the United States provide the health care that every other “civilized” country provides its citizens. I would gladly pay an extra $100-plus a year in premiums to protect the lives of millions of uninsured people.

Denying the medical support needed to save a person’s life is tantamount to withholding water from a person dying of thirst in the desert and telling him or her to walk to an oasis a hundred miles away.