If you or anyone in your family figures on ever becoming sick or injured, or stands to benefit from preventive medicine -- in other words, if you're a human being -- then there should be no mystery why the issue of health care hovers over American politics.

Yet candidates seem to have difficulty getting traction with it, and voters have difficulty sorting out which proposals might actually lead to a cure. The topic is complicated. Vested interests oppose change. The very idea of change raises a gut-level fear that as bad as things are now, if the politicians go to meddling they might make it worse.

The symptoms of a health care financing and delivery system in deep trouble are hard to miss. Paying for the care that helps us cope with the conditions and illnesses that bear down on us with every breath we take becomes more and more of a challenge.

Because the situation worsens incrementally, we tend to grumble and adjust. But the adjustments erode our bank accounts while doing nothing to improve our health. Our medical system may be capable of astounding feats, using the most advanced technologies, drugs and procedures, but we're not as healthy a population as all that wizardry suggests we should be.

Millions of us must rely on stopgap treatments parceled out at emergency rooms when pain or sickness can no longer be ignored. No follow-up, no prevention, no relationship with a trusted doctor who knows one's medical history.

When do the combined effects of these problems become intolerable? Millions are shut out of the health insurance system because they don't work for a company that subsidizes coverage and they can't afford it themselves. Seriously, do the rest of us want to be complicit in that kind of abuse?

Even if those of us with insurance can stand to look in the mirror while the uninsured millions scrounge care at emergency rooms or clinics -- or do without -- we face a pattern of rising out-of-pocket costs and shrinking coverage. Try to buy insurance on the open market and you might be looking at $1,000 a month. Older folks have to pay serious money to keep from falling through holes in the tattered Medicare safety net.

Two illustrious doctors of political arts, John McCain and Barack Obama, have stepped forward to consult on this vexing case. And they're recommending two starkly different courses of treatment.

McCain thinks the symptoms would be alleviated by a strong dose of market forces. His basic approach: Eliminate the tax advantages that now flow to employers who put money toward employees' health insurance coverage. Rechannel that money into personal tax credits -- $2,500 a year for individuals, $5,000 for families -- for people who bought their own insurance. Even unemployed people who didn't have an income tax liability would be eligible for the credits.

The thinking is that coverage would be broadened among the self-employed, underemployed and jobless. Extra competition among insurers would, it's hoped, push prices down. But a chief drawback is that employers now offering coverage might drop it once they lost their tax break. And prices would have to fall significantly for a family to be able to buy decent health insurance for $5,000.

Obama's plan includes a requirement that all employers except the smallest offer coverage or pay a tax. A national plan along the lines of Medicare would be created to serve the otherwise uninsured. All children would be covered in some form.

Writing for the current issue of the authoritative New England Journal of Medicine, health policy expert Jonathan Oberlander of UNC-Chapel Hill compares the McCain and Obama remedies. Not surprisingly, he finds them driven by the same kind of contrasting views on the proper role of markets vs. the role of government that often divide Republicans and Democrats.

While he stops short of endorsing the Obama approach, Oberlander says that McCain's plan probably would not make much of a dent in the ranks of the uninsured and that its reliance on the individual insurance market, in which people would have to try to find the best deal, would mean inferior coverage for many.

In an editorial, the Journal concluded that Obama's plan "is more likely to provide coverage for most, if not all, Americans, but how effectively it would control costs is less certain." So, no magic elixir here. But could Obama at least put our health care system on the road to recovery?

We don't need miracles -- just a commitment to making sure that in the world's richest country, no one goes without a decent level of affordable care. There, that almost feels better already.

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