From time to time an adult is called to the hospital. You stand beside a friend or loved one's hospital bed, you do your best to put the beeping devices and tubes and hallway sounds aside and find the right things to say, the right spirit to say them in. The illness may be large or small, it may be threatening or painful, but in any case with the loss of health something deeply significant is being taken from the person in the bed there. Something substantial is at stake. Someone's suffering is real there. The quality of life now, perhaps ongoing, hangs in the balance.

But judging by the politics of health care, the thing you witness at the hospital is not very real. If it were real, politicians wouldn't play games with it, make points with it. If it were real to them, anyway. You have to conclude that the suffering of others, the real stakes of others, is not real enough to keep them from playing with the lives and hopes of those who happen to be sick.