My wife and I have been having an ongong discussion about the current national debate on some sort of government-provided universal health care. She comes down firmly on the side of "The current system isn't broken, so there's no need to fix it." Lately, however, I haven't been so sure that it isn't really broken.

Okay. Let me modify that statement. If your company has a comprehensive, name-brand health care plan -- and you don't do anything that would cause you to be bounced from the plan -- then the system probably works fine for you and your employees. However, if your company has a lousy plan, or if for some reason you find yourself without a plan, then you might be wondering why so many people seem to think the system isn't broken. And that's exactly what happened to my own family over the past few weeks. My oldest son recently turned 19, and I was notified by our health care provider that he would be kicked off our plan effective May 31 unless we could provide evidence that he was a full-time student. Without boring you with all the details, on June 1 he was without heath care coverage. I didn't realize this until I went to the pharmacy to fill a prescription for him during the first week of June, and was told that the medication that usually costs us just a $15 co-pay would be charged at its full amount -- some number in the vicinity of $500. For a one-month supply.

THAT immediately woke me up.

After much paperwork, faxes, phone calls, and filing of appeals, I learned yesterday that my son had been reinstated onto our health care plan, and that he was good throughout the rest of his school career.

While all's well that ended well, I got a three-week-long taste of what it's like not to have adequate health care, and let me tell you that I didn't like it one bit. While we can debate the need for a government-run system of national health care till the cows come home, one thing that can't be debated is that heath care costs continue to skyrocket, and small businesses -- and the people who work in them -- are finding it increasingly difficult to afford quality health care. This is a problem that is going to drag on our economy and create real and lasting financial hardships for our citizens for decades to come.

Last week I was doing some research for the upcoming third edition of Home-Based Business For Dummies, and I ran across a recent study on medical bankruptcy in the United States in 2007. According to the article -- which will appear in an upcoming issue of the American Journal of Medicine -- 62.1 percent of all bankruptcies in our country have a medical cause, a 50-percent increase from 2001 to 2007. Someone has a catastrophic accident, or a prolonged bout with cancer or some other illness. While that number is bad enough, what I found particularly shocking is that 75 percent of these medical debtors HAD health insurance.

If the system works, then it sure has a funny way of showing it.