The health care agenda that Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore espouses is a far cry from the idealistic vision he unveiled toward the beginning of the Clinton-Gore administration. His earlier push for universal health care is nowhere to be found in this election cycle.

Instead, Gore is catering to the elderly, using catchphrases like creating a "lock box" for Medicare. While this is certainly a more desirable usage of Medicare funds than the tax cuts proposed by the Bush campaign, it obscures the most pressing issue in the health care debate: providing medical coverage to all Americans.

It is not difficult to understand why this point has been lost, however. The most powerful lobbying group on Capitol Hill is the one representing those who have the most at stake when Medicare issues are on the table. The American Association of Retired People represents a rapidly growing segment of the population, which also happens to have the highest voter turnout of any age group in the United States.

Their main concerns seem to be the only ones that Vice President Gore’s health care plan addresses. Gore proposes to pump $356 billion into Medicare over the next ten years. He also wants to give a $3000 tax credit to retirees to compensate for other costs and allow people between the ages of 55 and 65 to buy into Medicare.

These changes exclusively benefit the elderly and are some of the only ones that Gore has proposed to reform a failing health care system. He wants to extend the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) to all children of working-poor families with incomes below 250% of the federal poverty level.

But this is less significant than it may seem; most states are already offering similar or even more generous benefits to these groups. This minor repair, which insures a group with a relatively low risk of problems necessitating major health care, does not address millions who are in dire need of medical insurance and have no way to obtain it.

The policies of greater HMO liability and increased funding for research on diseases that Gore proposes do not offer much aid to those most in need of coverage, either. Incidentally, much of the research is targeted toward diseases that affect the elderly.

This is not to say that the proposals offered by the Bush camp are desirable. In fact, Bush proposes a privatization scheme that would waste enormous amounts of money and an HMO reform policy that would allow private insurers to draw up "benefits packages" which better suit their economic needs than the interests of their patients.

Both major presidential candidates have ignored the problem at the heart of the health care debate. Neither Bush nor Gore has addressed the fact that 44 million Americans are currently without health care insurance.

Many of these people are at the low end of the labor market and do not have employer-provided health care packages, yet earn too much to qualify for Medicare insurance. They cannot afford to buy individual policies. This number is growing and could spiral out of control if a recession were to hit.

Additionally, individuals without health insurance are much more likely to contract preventable diseases and are more frequently hospitalized than those with coverage — costing them unnecessarily large hospital bills and lost work time.

The plight of the uninsured is especially heartbreaking considering the recent economic boom and record U.S. budget surpluses, which could go so far to assist struggling families and individuals with easily curable ailments.

One might think that such a widespread problem would be high on the agenda of any politician aspiring to win the presidency. When one looks at the voting bloc that suffers the most from lack of insurance, however, the relatively low priority that both major party candidates have given it is unsurprising.

Low-paid, uninsured workers tend to have lower levels of political organization, less time and resources to organize, and hence, less access to the political system. As a result, the political process is dominated by a highly organized group of people with a large amount of resources and time.

It is a tragedy that Al Gore has missed such an historic opportunity to seize on this issue and initiate real change in the way things are run in the health care world. The New Democrat side of him has caved in to the politics of the minute and sacrificed ideals that are integral to the realization of the liberal vision.