As President Obama ratchets up the pressure this week on Congress to vote on healthcare reform before the summer recess, it must be noted that the discussion does not connect the dots to our broken food system. And while I commend President Obama for taking on such a contentious subject with the aim of improving the lives of those suffering in our current economy, two thirds of the American people want a single-payer system and the option is not even on the table. Addressing these two issues will be critical for deep and lasting healthcare reform.

The United States is the only high-income industrialized country not using some form of a single-payer healthcare system. Single-payer could be an expanded form of Medicare, and actually ensures under the Civil Rights Act that no one will be denied care. Conversely, privatized insurance companies can and do deny care with near-impunity. The administrative simplicity of the single-payer system would save on overhead costs, while the costs of care would go down because the profit margins private insurers would be cut out of the equation.

Despite what anyone tells you, single-payer is not socialized medicine, and no ominous government bureaucracy would step in and deny or “ration” care. The critics of single-payer are either paid to tell you this, or are brainwashed by the multi-million dollar lobbying and advertising paid for by insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry. It is in these two industries’ interest of continued uber-profitability for our broken system to stay as is; sickness, to these corporations, is an opportunity.

Parallels can be drawn in agribusiness, which also profits from feeding us cheap calories, and doesn’t want any changes coming out of Washington. Indeed, the healthcare debate is intimately intertwined with our food system. We spend twice as much per capita as Canada does on healthcare, and not because Canadians are “waiting in a line,” and getting denied care; denied care has become our specialty. ‘Pre-existing condition’ could quite possibly be the scariest phrase in our language for the 46 million uninsured.

In fact, we spend more on healthcare because of what we eat. And what we eat is related to the choices our politicians make on national, state and city-wide policies concerning what we feed our kids in school; what we allow advertisers to tell us about what to eat; food labeling; food accessibility in rural and urban areas; what crops we subsidize; whether or not the people who grow our food have access to healthcare (many don’t) and more.

In these debates we don’t ask: is healthcare a right or an option? Higher education is so expensive now that workers are bound to their workplace because of massive debt, feeling compelled to overwork in order to keep their health insurance, and therefore are too exhausted to cook. It’s all related. It has been proven time and time again that what we eat correlates to our future incidences of preventable diseases, all on the rise, like diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Even the Centers for Disease Control released a study giving recommendations for changes in our communities that could lower the current rates of obesity — these are great, but they put the impetus on the local level changes instead of nudging policy-makers. And still to bring all this up in the healthcare debate, it seems, would be political suicide.

Its possible that “the public option” that Obama is promoting is a necessary first step to an overhaul of the healthcare system. The good news is that this new plan seeks to better regulate insurance companies, and seeks to lower costs through competition (Paul Krugman said this in his column in yesterday’s Times, “Reform, if it happens, will rest on four main pillars: regulation, mandates, subsidies and competition.”). Mandates require the uninsured to buy into an insurance program or pay a penalty. Medicaid would be expanded, and subsidies would be extended to cover some of the costs. These subsidies are said to be canceled out by other cost-cutting measures. So why are the insurance and pharmaceutical industries so happy? They have brought Harry and Louise back to throw their weight behind the plan, indicating that perhaps the competition fostered by the public option might not be enough. So how do we get from here to “real change that we can believe in?”