Pass the Senate health-care reform bill now. Call it a Christmas present to the nation.

Deeply flawed as the bill may be, it offers the promise of dramatically better health-care coverage in the United States -- and to let this chance slip away is to risk killing reform for another generation to come.

As Bill Clinton, who famously failed to reform health care early in his presidency and never got a second shot at it, said last week: "Take it from someone who knows -- these chances don't come around every day."

The Senate health-care bill, for which Majority Leader Harry Reid on Saturday finally found the crucial 60th vote necessary for passage, would expand insurance to 30 million more Americans.

No longer could insurance companies deny a person coverage because of a current or past medical problem -- a pre-existing condition. No longer could insurance companies drop a person who gets sick.

No longer would quality health care be unaffordable for millions of lower-and middle-income Americans. The Senate bill includes financial aid to those who can't get insurance through their employers, as well as tax breaks for small businesses that do provide insurance.

These are dramatic and historic advances. These are the building blocks of a more civilized and caring society. And once these reforms are enacted, we predict it will become impossible -- as it has become with Social Security -- to roll them back.

The Senate bill does little to address the exploding cost of health care in America -- a formidable problem whether this bill is passed or not. But remarkably, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the expanded insurance coverage provided for in the Senate bill would not in itself add to the federal deficit because it includes tax increases on the wealthy and cuts in Medicare.

We would prefer that the Senate bill went further, that it covered even more of the uninsured and included a government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurance companies -- the so-called public option.

But the votes weren't there.

Reid needs 60 votes to fend off a Republican filibuster, and he and the Obama administration struggled to get them even for this stripped-down set of reforms. As it is, we can't help but worry about last-minute defectors.

Late Friday, Reid nailed down the 60th vote, from Sen. Ben Nelson, an anti-abortion Democrat from Nebraska, by adding an amendment to the bill that would give states authority to bar coverage of abortions by new government-approved insurance plans.

Some health plans receiving federal subsidies, however, could offer coverage by abortion by separating federal money from the premiums paid by subscribers, so that no government money would be used for abortion.

Conservative critics of the bill worry about the costs, about the higher taxes, about the heavy hand of government and about taxpayer dollars -- even with the new amendment -- being spent to pay for abortions. Liberal critics say the bill doesn't go far enough.

We respect the views of those critics, but time's up. This bill must be passed before Santa hits the Beltway, before this golden chance slips away. Too much good hangs in the balance.

Social change for the better seldom comes to America in one fell swoop, even when it should. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s moved from seats on the bus to seats in the classroom to equal voting rights. Social Security evolved over 30 years, steadily covering more Americans.

Incremental progress, not revolutionary change, is the stabilizing norm in a free and open democracy where competing interest groups push and pressure and check one another.

And compromise -- settling for half a loaf -- can be a noble end.

It is time, for the greater good of the nation, to settle for that half a loaf -- affordable health care for more Americans.

The forces of reform, including the Obama administration, are always free to fight another day for the other half of the loaf.