When Russia invaded Georgia several months ago, ratings for presidential hopeful John McCain went up since he’s running as a national security candidate.

Now that the fight between Russia and Georgia is over and the financial market has crashed, ratings for presidential candidate Barack Obama, whose platform is the economy, have been topping McCain’s.

National security, economy, energy, health, and education are considered the five most important priorities in America. The order of these priorities, however, does shift according to the current events. Of these five, health and education are the least powerful forces in terms of swaying voters and influencing real policy change today.

In the age of globalization and real-time Internet speed, even a medium-level crisis of economics, national security, or energy could easily have an immediate impact that reaches all levels of society.

For health care, on the other hand, it would take a calamity of global proportion like the Black Plague in the past or the AIDS epidemic for our nation and its institutions to react briskly. Why? It’s because the American health care and educational systems have been limping for so long that in absence of any fear or urgency, the dire situations have been accepted as a norm.

With no set national standards, state and local school districts are empowered to create their own programs and benchmarks. As a result, the American public educational system is chopped up into so many different models and options that the teaching and learning parts have become muddy in many parts of the country.

By and large, just about everybody—educators, policy makers, researchers, business leaders, and parents—is not happy and wanted to make changes. At the same time there’s sense of helplessness since the problem has festered for too long with no clear-cut solutions.

Unifying the American public on issues of reforming education and health care is often difficult because the urgency is not there and the impacts are felt unevenly. In Santa Clara County (California), where it’s home to many high-tech firms like Intel and Apple, some of its public schools’ API (Academic Performance Index) scores are near the maximum 1,000 points but roughly 60 percent of the district’s other schools’ scores are below the minimum 800.

Nationally about 16 percent of American population does not have health insurance coverage in 2006, according a U.S. Census Bureau study released in August 2007. The same report shows that “the number of uninsured rose 2.2 million between 2005 and 2006 and has increased by almost 9 million people since 2000.” This trend is particularly alarming since this study was focused on the working adults aged from 18 to 64. If they don’t have health insurance, chances are their families are also un-insured.

In Canada and a number of European countries that provide universal health care coverage and public education, their approach is based more on social values and less on economics.

When Bill Clinton tried to reform the health care system from the consumers’ perspective in his first term, the pharmaceutical and insurance sectors defeated the effort on economic grounds.

Free enterprise is the backbone of the American system. But this system also has a built-in feature that for the good of the general public, the government has a “moral” obligation to intervene and to regulate the system as well as to initiate social programs on behalf of its people. That’s how rural America is electrified and connected with the national telephone grid and precious natures are preserved under the National Park System.

Health care and education certainly fit in this category of social programs that required government’s strong intervention from the moral perspective.

But more than that. In the age of globalization, the future of America is also depended on what we do today about our health care and educational systems. In essence, they pose a formidable economic problem that we need to consider.

In the 21st Century, the future is less about manufacturing and agriculture but more on high-value information and high technologies. This means the more educated our society is, the better prepared we would be to maintain our top position this increasingly competitive global economy.

American universities and colleges are still considered the best the country but increasingly their graduates of science and medicine are non-citizens who would head back home (RAND’s Science and Technology – Issue Paper 241 (2003)). The National Defense University’s April 2004 Report also highlights that while the pace of producing science and engineering workforce in China, India, Japan, and South Korea is accelerating, the opposite is true in America.

Bill Gates, America’s best-known technologist, had recently testified in Congress in March of this year that our country has endangered itself by not improving our educational system for more science and math to foster a larger home-grown high-tech workforce and maintain the lead in innovation.

An investment in our educational system today is therefore not just a “moral” obligation but also a necessity for the future.

On health care, in additional to the rising number of the un-insured, demographic change trends suggest a dramatic alteration in our economy in the near future. The CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report in 2003 shows that the proportion of American population older than 65 is “projected to increase from 12.4 percent (35 million) in 2000 to 19.6 percent (estimated at 71 million) in 2030.

Already we have seen nursing home and home health-care expenditures in the U.S. “doubled during 1990-2001 period, reaching approximately $132 billion,” according to the same report. Public financing for long-term caring of the elders during 2000-2020 is projected to increase about 20 to 21 percent. All these trends show if we don’t work on this now, the impact would constitute an enormous strain on our economy.

Our top five priorities are actually inter-connected. In fact, they are rested upon how we solve the educational and health care problems in the short and long runs. A sick and poorly educated population would not be able to compete globally to maintain a strong economy, perpetuate national security, and achieve energy independence with green technologies.

It’s vital that by the 2012 presidential election, America should have candidates running on foresighted platforms of health care and educational reforms.

Julian Do