(UNDATED) U.S. health care is a mess. Will a trillion dollars really make any difference? Tune in after the Congress returns from its August recess to find out.

For several weeks, six key senators sat around a table drinking coffee and eating chocolate-covered potato chips, negotiating how to revamp the American health care system. The problem? More than 1,300 insurance companies insure about 80 percent of the population. That leaves more than 40 million folks uninsured.

The president somehow thinks that dumping in tons of cash will fix the system. But here’s a news flash: too often it doesn’t matter if you have insurance.

As anyone (including myself) who has dealt with passive-aggressive insurance providers can tell you, the quality of care is often unrelated to the type of coverage you buy. Even if you are “covered,” the name of the insurance game is “delay, deny, delay.”

A century of insurance industry growth has changed a not-for-profit charity enterprise into a mega-industry. The insurance concept is good: we all put some money into the pot; if and when we need it, we take some out. But the road from concept to execution is now paved with gold.

What happened? Well, for one, there’s old-fashioned greed, which seems to have replaced the heart of health care. The staggering profits of insurance companies, combined with their unwillingness to pay, are, quite simply, sinful.

What to do? A specific contrast comes to mind.

As the 20th century beckoned in New York City, a young nurse named Lillian Wald founded what came to be the Henry Street Settlement and, later, the Visiting Nurse Service of New York. This now-huge operation provides home nursing care throughout the metropolitan region.

Dear Lillian would have to wait a long time to send a nurse to your door these days. Sometimes — too many times — the system fails. Fax this form. Make this call. What is the code? Where is the referral? Bottom line: no money, no service.

In the early 19th century, a Catholic woman named Jeanne Jugan brought an ill and elderly woman home, and put her in her own bed. Other women joined her ministry. Now, 2,700 members of the order she founded, the Little Sisters of the Poor, provide residential care for elderly poor who have no one to care for them and nowhere to go. The nuns fund their U.S. residences through Medicaid and private donors. Bottom line: come, the sisters say, and we’ll worry about the money later.

Wald and Jugan saw similar needs. Sick people need nursing. Elderly people need assistance. Both organizations that began as non-profits continue as non-profits. Wald’s idea got caught up in the insurance behemoth; Jugan’s did not.

Which brings us back to the senators, the president, and the president’s money truck. I’m all for spending money to fix broken a system, but I am not convinced money will repair the fractured machinery that keeps us from the health care we need and have already paid for.

I am convinced, however, that the nature of caring — whether it grows from secular or religious values — is at the root of the problem. Does our society think it is necessary to pay attention to the wounds of others? Where is the profit in changing a bandage? What is that value of feeding an old person?

That, my friends, is the bottom line. We look for “value” and “profit” in too many places these days. Not-for-profit health care organizations are being squeezed by insurance companies. The first step to fiscal recovery? Health insurance should be a not-for-profit enterprise. Until it is, U.S. health care will remain the mess that it is.

(Phyllis Zagano is senior research associate-in-residence at Hofstra University and author of several books in Catholic Studies.)