Remember the name Criste Reimer. I predict you’ll be hearing it a lot in coming years.

Aside from the extraordinarily bad health Ms. Reimer endured, there wasn’t much unusual about the Kansas City woman. During her 47 years of life, she collected recipes, made scrapbooks and surfed the Web under the screen name cudlypoo. She had no children, and attended a Methodist church regularly with her husband Stanley. What has made Criste Reimer famous is not the way she lived, but the way she died.

On August 14, Criste Reimer’s body was found on the pavement outside her 4th-floor apartment building. According to police, Stanley was still in the apartment when they responded to the call. “Something bad” happened, he reportedly explained to officers. “She didn’t jump.”

The police didn’t need Stanley to tell them that. Criste Reimer had been on death’s door. At the time of her fatal plunge, she was suffering from uterine cancer and neurological impairments. She weighed just 75 pounds, and could barely walk – let alone heave herself over a balcony railing.

What Criste Reimer could do was rack up massive medical bills. Aside from her most recent problems, Ms. Reimer had a history of brain injury, hypothyroidism, hydrocephalus and orthopedic problems. Yet like almost 50-million other Americans, she had no health insurance – and only $725 per month in income. So two weeks ago, police say, Stanley Reimer decided that the only way for the couple to stave off destitution was for his wife to die. By their account, he walked his wife to the balcony, kissed her, and threw her off the balcony. He has since been charged with second-degree murder, and is now awaiting trial.

This is one of those singularly awful stories that instantly freezes your typing finger as you PgDn through Google News’ headlines. Ater reading it, I found it hard to think of anything else but those agonizing few seconds between the moment Stanley Reimer kissed his wife and the moment her tiny, sick body hit the ground. Before I’d even finished, in fact, I’d already created a detailed cinematic rendition of the event in my mind. (Just a few paragraphs into this blog, I bet you have, too.)

Like those horrible stories about abducted children who have laws named after them, this is the sort of memorable, tragic death that can change a nation. Stanley Reimer may well simply be a mentally unstable cold-hearted murderer. (That is certainly the way his wife’s relatives tell it.) But whatever nasty things emerge about him at trial, it will be America’s health system that is remembered as Criste’s true killer.

For decades, American politicians have resisted the trend in the Western world toward nanny-state collectivism, hewing to their principled, libertarian insistence on making working-age middle-class Americans responsible for their health costs. But in recent years, a majority of Americans have been telling pollsters they want their government to pay for universal health care. As Michael Moore showed in his propaganda film Sicko, tales of heartless health-insurance companies, needless death and family bankruptcy aren’t hard to find. Tiny well-publicized tragedies are how health-care mountains are moved.

In the early 1990s, American conservatives were able to stave off universal HillaryCare by arguing that bureaucrats do an even lousier job apportioning health care than HMOs. And to watch the steady stream of my fellow Canadians who flock south for superior treatment, I’d say they have a point. But amidst the emotive argument-by-anecdote that dominates health-care debate, such abstract logic is being overwhelmed. In the tale of Criste Reimer, universal health-care advocates may have found the martyr who finally tips the balance for good.

jkay@nationalpost.com

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