I SPENT LABOR DAY visiting some dear friends.

One of them is a doctor of the old school.

We talked of many things, among them health care reform, and he told us a story, a true anecdote, about a person who desperately needed health care and who had to wait because the doctor involved refused to supply treatment.

The issue was expense. My friend was furious. He wanted to know what kind of doctor would refuse to care for a patient, and he wanted to know how that doctor was allowed to graduate from medical school.

I don't come down in exactly the same place he did on that issue. Partly, I'm sure, it's because I've never been a doctor.

But I see his point, and I sympathize.

My friend sees it as a personal moral issue, an issue of character: one simply doesn't refuse care to those who need it. And, so far as it is a personal moral issue, I quite agree.

If I am crossing a desert, not another car in sight, and come across a stranded motorist, run out of gas, I give him a lift to the gas station. I don't ask whether the motorist is a solid citizen, whether he paid his taxes last year, whether he has a steady job.

He's a fellow human being, and he's in need. That's all I need to know.

But, if I am crossing that same desert and find a stranded motorist every six feet, the situation changes. The need is greater than I can meet, and I end up weighing it against my other responsibilities—to return home to my family, to get to work and do my share there, to keep whatever other promises I've made and meet whatever other obligations I have.

Our country is in a similar place with health care. If the problem were small, if only a few people were falling through the cracks, and the expense in time or money were minuscule, we might be able to simply expect the doctors to go the extra mile—take care of an extra patient here and there without counting the cost.

But that isn't how it is.

Health care has become time consuming and expensive, the numbers who can't afford it are greater every day, and the cost in anxiety and decision-making to those who can afford it is sometimes overwhelming.

I find myself in agreement with my friend on the central issue, though—it is a moral issue. But the character in question is not just the character of a single doctor here or there. It's the character of our nation.

Are we the sort of people who let a child, an abandoned mother, an employee who has just been laid off, a father with a "pre-existing condition", suffer? Or are we the sort of people who step up and take care of those in need?

We hear a lot of talk from the religious right about how this is a "Christian nation". Well, here's a test.

What do you think a Christian nation would do—tell the man in the ditch that he should have been more responsible, should have planned his trip better? Pass him by, like the priest and the temple assistant in the parable? Or take care of him, like the "despised Samaritan"?

There is a case to be made that universal health care is to everyone's selfish advantage—that it's just the smart thing to do. It will help our economy, it will save untold waste, it will help us to compete with the work forces in other countries, etc., etc., etc.

All that is true.

But, speaking as a "despised liberal", I keep coming back to a more fundamental question.

Shouldn't we just see to it that the weak and the sick and the injured among us are taken care of?

Shouldn't we just do the right thing?

At least, that's what I think today.