OPINION: Why Trumpcare, Obamacare aren't the cure for our health system

The window for the United States to join nearly every other developed democracy in the world in having single-payer, government-backed health care grows bigger and clearer each day.

Why? As the health care debate rages in Washington, D.C., and around the rest of the country, it is becoming increasingly clear to many that the health insurance system we have today is broken and has been broken for more than 25 years. It was broken before Obamacare, it was broken after Obamacare, and it will be broken whether Trumpcare passes or fails.

Clearly, no matter the adjustments to our largely private-insurance-based system today, we still have huge problems with accessibility and affordability. These two fundamental issues weren't solved with Obamacare and could be made worse by Trumpcare. Accordingly, Americans are becoming more amenable to a single-payer option. Recent poll data bear this out.

The latest Pew polling on health care shows that support for single-payer national insurance has risen 5 points since January and 12 points since 2014, with 33 percent of voters supporting a single-payer solution as of early June. Among voters under 30 - the biggest voting bloc for future elections - support rises to 45 percent.

Further, according to Pew, 60 percent of voters say the government has the responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care. This is up from 47 percent in 2014 - a 13 point increase in just over two years. The argument that government should stay out of health care has been lost by special interests trying to pursue the status quo and ideologues on the right over the last few years.

Single-payer used to be advocated only by those on the very far left, the likes of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, but as the polling shows, single-payer is becoming more and more acceptable and desired by the mainstream of American politics. It wasn't long ago that people such as Hillary Clinton and President Obama were opposed to single-payer; today a majority of Democratic voters support a single-payer solution. I expect that the Democratic nominee for president in 2020 will need to support a single-payer system.

We all have our own stories about health care in this country, and I am no different. I had a younger sister die from opioid addiction, leaving three beautiful young children behind. My identical twin daughters were born premature and needed extensive hospital care. One died in the hospital, and her sister spent nine months in the neonatal unit. I served on the board of a Catholic charity hospital system in central Texas and could see, front and center, all the problems related to affordability and accessibility. Like many of you, my experiences and the heartbreaking stories of others opened my eyes to the tragic consequences of our current health care system and its major flaws.

As politicians in Washington continue to fiddle with our health care system, the calls for single-payer will grow stronger and louder each day and will make its passage more likely in the years ahead. We must come to terms with the idea that this should be a debate about health care and not a debate about health insurance. Citizens have begun to learn that those are two very different things.

Matthew Dowd is an ABC News analyst and special correspondent. Opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the views of ABC News.