My last diary was about cats too but this one ties into health care too. Here's the story:
Yesterday I received a call from my girlfriend saying that her sister had seen a kitten near the place where she works out, and upon receiving the directions I spent the next hour and a bit looking for it as it was fairly far away. Eventually I found it - go to the hotel...go behind hotel, find street with restaurants and steakhouses...find health centre...find coffee shop on the left...see stairs leading down...go down to the basement and lo and behold, there was a kitten hiding underneath a sign! Found you! This kitten seems to have lost her mother as she (or he, but we'll go with she for the time being) kept on just walking back and forth and every once in a while would mew at the sky a bit.
Luckily this isn't a sad story, because I always have cat food on me and was able to feed the kitten, then brought her back to my house where she's been chilling in a box for the past 20 hours, occasionally waking up to ask for some more food or water or milk.
So what does this have to do with health care? Well, animals for the most part have a pretty thin safety net that relies almost entirely on one's own ability. You have to be healthy to hunt, and if you're a kitten then your mom has to be healthy enough to do that for herself in order to keep her weight up to keep giving milk. After that she needs to start introducing other types of food and that's no easy task either. Take one factor out of the equation though and it can often be fatal. A kitten without her mom is nearly defenseless and can only survive by scrounging for food, and even adult cats can suddenly lose their ability to fend for themselves due to an injury or disease. It's the animal kingdom equivalent of falling through the cracks, and it's a catch-22: it's hard to hunt because the cat is injured, and the injury doesn't heal like it should because the cat doesn't have enough food, which is found by hunting.
For a very good article on how this works with people, see here from the Washington Post. It's pretty much the same catch-22 where the less you have the harder it is to get started.
In this kitten's case she's lucky that she has us, because we were able to see that she clearly wasn't capable of surviving on her own and needs to be given a few days/weeks of treatment before she can start doing things for herself again (she's mostly skin and bones right now). The eventual plan once she becomes a normal healthy kitten again is to take her to the temple where the other cats live, because it's a pretty good environment for a cat. No traffic besides the odd truck bringing in some supplies, lots of places to find food, and many other cats to befriend. I also visit there every day so it's easy to keep an eye on the situation.
What we've been able to create in most developed countries in the world have been societies similar to this - a society in which you are free to do as you choose and live the life you choose to live and suffer the positive and negative effects that came from the choices you make, but when the sh*t hits the fan we still have your back. No mom? No problem. Lost your job? You can still live, and we'll help you find another one. Hit by a car and broke a few bones? Just lie down here and we'll take care of you until they heal.
As for the two imperatives mentioned in the title, they are quite easy to understand. The easiest way to explain where morality comes from is to reference the golden rule, where we are capable of treating others the way we would like to be treated. Those that have a good health plan have the moral imperative to understand that not everyone has such a rosy situation, and that a society in which many human beings are still in a state where one bit of bad luck could derail everything they've striven for their entire life is far from ideal.
The practical imperative is also quite easy. Take Employee A. He's been working at Company X for 15 years. Now he's sick, and Company X's plan isn't good enough to provide for this. Employee A can't work like he used to anymore (he could if he had access to real health care). Now the country has lost all the productivity that Employee A could be creating if he hadn't otherwise gotten hit with an illness that his plan didn't cover. Then multiply that by a few million to see how much productivity is lost over the entire country.
In our kitten's case, once she gets back to normal she'll be able to be the productive cat she was born to be - that means chasing string, chewing plants, and absorbing sunlight. Imagine all the string that would never have gotten chased or the plants that would never have gotten chewed if we hadn't stepped in. A horrific prospect.