You could almost hear the groaning: “No, not again!”

A group of leading analysts and health policy advisers, many of them veterans of failed health overhaul efforts in the past, implored lawmakers not to give up on revamping the system now that the going has gotten tough politically.

From both the left and the right, their warning to the middle class was: While you may worry about the uncertainties about changing the system, the risks of taking refuge in the status quo are much greater now than they were at critical junctures of past overhaul debates when Congress simply walked away after controversy flared.

They also sent an “open letter” to Congress saying that the “current health care system is in crisis and is not sustainable in the future.” Despite the controversy over existing proposals in Congress, “the bills under consideration contain provisions that will seriously address problems in health care and must be reconciled,” they declared.

Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt said in a statement released at the Sept. 17 briefing that there’s a lot at stake for the middle class in the overhaul given rising costs: “Total spending on health care for a typical privately insured American family is now $16,700 . . .  it will double again by 2019. Wages and salaries, on the other hand, are rising at less than 3 percent a year.”

While President Obama in his Sept. 9 speech to a joint session of Congress made a strong moral case for covering the uninsured, “the middle class also must ask itself whether it can weather the brewing financial storm on its own, without the benefit of health reform,” Reinhardt said.

William L. Roper, who served in the Reagan and Bush administrations in key health posts including head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and head of the Medicare and Medicaid programs, agreed with Reinhardt.

It is “so important” to listen to Reinhardt, said Roper, now CEO for the UNC Health Care System at the University of North Carolina. “The way things are going is a recipe for disaster.” While leading health overhaul proposals will mean lower Medicare reimbursement at his system, the financial burden of caring for uninsured patients is so crushing that Congress must act “this year,” he said.

Brandeis University economist Stuart Altman recalled his three-year stint advising President Richard Nixon on health policy. The media at the time predicted a health overhaul was inevitable. “Everybody was for it” but in the end Congress walked away,” he said. Then in the early 1990s, Congress “just punted” again.

The number of uninsured has risen from 14 million in the Nixon years around 50 million today and health spending has jumped from $70 billion then to over $2 trillion now. What scares Altman as he looks at the latest debate is that it would be so easy for lawmakers to walk away again, but the big loser would be the middle class.

“They think they’re fine” if Congress bails, but “they’re not fine,” he warned.

Chip Kahn, a key health adviser to congressional Republicans in the 1980s and 1990s who helped defeat President Bill Clinton’s plan as an insurance lobbyist, said he has a simple message: “Good intentions just won’t do it.” Congress has to be willing to come up with the money needed to move to universal coverage, he said. “It’s just got to get done.”

“Unless we make the effort to get there, I just don’t think we’re going to make progress on all these issues” including bending the cost curve, said Kahn, who now heads the Federation of American Hospitals.