My regular reader (Hi, Jeff!) might have noticed I have missed a couple of columns recently. These absences stem from a bit of a medical crisis in the family. A couple weeks ago, my youngest, who in addition to running a water testing laboratory, has ridden horses for more than 30 years and is a professional trainer of people and horses, had a fall.

A bad fall.

For years, people who want to learn how to ride and eventually go to horse shows and jump over things come to her, and other people bring their recalcitrant and (sometimes) mean horses to her so she can ride them and teach them how to be productive members of the horse world.  In more than 30 years, though she had a fall or two, she never broke a bone.

Until two weeks ago.

She was riding in the arena of the small ranch she lives on with a couple other housemates who are also horse people, and a feral cat popped into view. The details are murky, but the horse she was riding was startled and jumped sideways and my daughter found herself on the ground, with, as she so colorfully put it, “one elbow too many” on her left arm. She snapped the upper bone, which I do not find humerus.

Happily, she had her fancy earbuds in, and they detected the fall and asked if she wanted her phone to autodial 911. Instead, she told the phone to call her housemate, who appeared immediately, even as the horse that threw her (whom I now call “gluestick”) raced around in concern, looking for a grown up.

So, I’ve been up at her place, north of Fort Collins, quite a bit in the last two weeks, tending to her needs and being there for her during a long surgical procedure that ended up with a 7-inch plate and seven screws holding her bone, once again, in one piece. I’m happy to report she continues to improve and expects to be back at work, albeit with a sling, this week.

Now, I must explain having spent more than 25 years on active duty with the Air Force, and now being a military retiree, I’ve never given a thought to the costs of health care for me or my family. But as my daughter is in her 30s, she is long past being covered by my military health care. So, I was in for a series of shocks regarding costs. You know, the kind of shocks you folks, my kindly readers, have had to deal with your whole lives, if you haven’t been in the military.

When I took my kid to the first appointment, I was surprised when they asked for a copay of almost $100. She has insurance through her employer, but there are still lots of costs. She has a $2,500 annual deductible, and I assumed that once she hit that level of spending, the insurance would kick in.

Not so much.

She had several copays, including on meds (which the military hands out for free), and copays for more doctor’s visits. Her surgery resulted in a new bill of an additional $9,000. I thought that was what the deductible was for, but apparently, you pay the deductible and specific fees for things like operations. Happily, she’s a good saver and can handle the costs (and of course, I was always there as a backup, if needed) but I remained shocked.

In other words, I saw the health care system for the first time the way you all see it every day. And, my friends, as you likely know, it’s nuts.

Frankly, I remain amazed by people who oppose the Affordable Care Act. Back in 2008, when I ran for the U.S. Congress, I was quite the radical, at least to some, by supporting Barack Obama’s health care plan, which would eventually become the ACA or, more colloquially, “Obamacare.” Today, having seen what can happen when a cat jumps the wrong way, I’m now fully on board for a national health care system.

Simply put, our spending per person is way out of whack with other nations. In fact, we spend roughly twice as much per capita as similar western nations. There are lots of reasons for this, and of course, it’s complicated, but there are experts out there like my friend Laura Packard, who is a national expert and whom I touched base with on this column. She has a weekly podcast on heath care costs, and I recommend it.

Back in the 1930s, when Medicare was first put forward (against huge opposition from the conservatives who called it “communist.” Today their tune has changed), the thought was the plan would gradually grow to include more people (disabled, younger, children of disabled parents) until, in many minds, it would become a national policy that covered everyone.

Can you imagine if we’d kept to that schedule? Sure, the health insurance companies would be gone, but I’m not at all sure that would be a bad thing. Most importantly, we’d see an end to the roughly 40% of personal bankruptcies that come from medical bills. In my own life, I know of a person who fell on ice while walking a neighbor’s dog and ended up with a personal bankruptcy due to the medical bills, and I think that is just wrong.

So, though I readily admit there is much I don’t know about health care costs today, it is clear we just can’t go on this way, as it hurts too many people. Given the United States is the only developed country without a national health care system, we should ask ourselves which is the more likely?

A) We are smarter than every other developed country?

Or

B) We are not.

I’m betting on B.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.