Consequently, we remain the only industrialized nation that does not provide health coverage for all its citizens. We allow people to die from lack of care. State budgets are balanced by cutting Medicaid programs for the poorest of the poor and the sickest of the sick, even though we pay more than any other nation. We rank dead last among 19 industrialized nations with the highest rate of preventable deaths. Quality is atrocious -- more than 100,000 people die every year in hospitals alone from preventable medical errors. If these deaths were a tsunami, the Red Cross would be at our door. But the mistakes are hidden in silence.

Because of cost, small businesses drop health insurance coverage, middle-class people are bankrupted even when they have insurance, jobs are outsourced and 45 million plus people have no insurance. More people will lose their health care coverage as employers and states cut back.

Yet nothing changes. Why?

Change requires major state and federal action. Without a clear new vision, special interests win by maintaining the status quo. Our bitterly divisive political parties can't make the case for change. They're part of the problem -- especially given who donates to their campaigns. Health care reform advocates are entrenched in two armed camps -- single payer vs. marketplace -- and like the politicians, they just keep slinging mud at each other while most Americans like neither solution and just want all the toxic mudslinging to stop.

After 75 years of stalemate, it's time to take health care out of the hands of politicians and partisan politics. It's time for we the people to climb into the driver's seat and demand change based on what we need and want. This doesn't require rocket science. It takes vision, political will and determination.

We see a health care system that supports the health of all our people, in our own communities. We see a system that doesn't discriminate against us because of our job, our gender, our race, our health, our age or our income. We the people, by using our American ingenuity and resourcefulness, can build a health care system of shared responsibility and accountability -- individuals, government, health care professionals and employers.

We can and must cover everyone -- not just because it is the right and fair thing to do, but because it will lower costs as well. We could have one uniform set of services for everyone, and those who want more can pay for that option. With good information and tools, we believe we the people are smart enough to make our own health care decisions together with the health care professional of our choice.

Basic services should include time with our provider to assure the best diagnosis and treatment. Health professionals should not be on a clock just to make ends meet. It serves neither our health nor their integrity.

Health plans should emphasize and promote prevention over high-tech cures to reduce disease. This would improve our health and lower costs. We must have constant research on outcomes and care variations to assure quality care.

We believe people have the right to know the costs, benefits and trade-offs in complex care decisions. We also need accountability in health care as we have in other public models, such as water and power companies. Bills must be self-explanatory, and not a tangle of cost shifting. We can do this in partnership with health care professionals and other nonpartisan, nonprofit organizations -- it's in all of our best health interests.

Our voice -- the public's voice -- hasn't been heard over the choruses profiting from the status quo. The complexity of our health care system is held up as a key reason the public cannot solve the problem -- "it's too complex."

But it's not. The complexity charge is an excuse to maintain the status quo, shouted by the foxes guarding the hen house.

More consensus exists than politicians and pundits lead us to believe. Our CodeBlueNow! Pulse® results from Iowa and Washington state (two very different states politically) clearly show there is astonishing agreement on some core values and key elements. We offer these visions and values as a starting point to create "The Voters' Health Care Platform." We must start with a vision and core values and build consensus along the way. This is a proven path to change with any social movement.

We start with this vision. Over this year and next, we will build consensus on other core elements, so we can add to the platform ways to organize, manage and finance a health care system. All the current proposals start with how to pay for health care, not with what it should do. Financing is the wrong place to start.

We are a pragmatic people who are at our best when we come together to solve problems -- that's how we started this country and won the civil rights and women's rights movements. We have been held at bay too long. It's time we have the voice and chart the direction, as we have done before when our leaders failed to address deep inequities.

We can have a health care system that meets our needs only by building We The People's Health Care Platform that we design, own and support. Then we will see our elected representatives implement it.

In politics, anyone can donate to a campaign. In a democracy, only you and I can give politicians their jobs and hold them accountable to us.