The chief architect of the U.S. Senate's proposal to reform the nation's health-care industry said Monday that all the discourse and pending debate comes down to one moral question: Is access to basic medical care for all Americans a right or not?

"We have to ask ourselves that basic question," Sen. Max Baucus, D-Montana, told reporters during a national teleconference. Regardless of a person's station in life, "is it our morality that all Americans have health insurance?"

Whether members of Congress are for reform or are resisting it, that should be the focal point as the issue moves through both houses, Baucus said.

Naysayers, including fellow committee member Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who last week raised the issue of whether requiring everyone to have health insurance could be unconstitutional, are tending to overwhelm the process with conjecture about details rather than seriously addressing the myriad problems with the way health care works now, Baucus told reporters in an interview arranged by the health-care consumer-advocacy group Families USA.

"Whether individual mandates could face a court challenge is an interesting issue," he said. "We've looked at (Hatch's) concerns, but I do think it's clearly constitutional."

The way the system works now, particularly the "debacle of American medicine of people going bankrupt because they get sick" must be changed. The practice of insurance carriers carving out sick people or not covering some at all because of the pre-existing condition loophole "must come to an end."

Other Republicans who are continually finding fault with the process, claiming it's being done in secret or that it will drive private insurance companies out of business, have had every opportunity to weigh in, Baucus said.

"Anyone who has had any interest in health-care reform has had every opportunity and will have the opportunity and the invitation to make their feelings known," he said. "Everything has been as open and transparent and as bipartisan as I could make it. People can follow the debate on the floor on the Web. All that's necessary is caring enough to find out."

Whether all Americans should have health care is about shared responsibility, he said. If so, then sharing how to get there is the responsibility of the public, the pharmaceutical companies, the insurers, the medical-device makers, hospitals and all other providers, he added.

"We're looking for ways to do that fairly and across the board," Baucus said.

Bending the cost curve down isn't necessarily a bad thing for the system, particularly to insurance companies who have resisted any kind of comprehensive reform.