One reason President Obama seems to be losing the struggle for meaningful health care reform is the big price tag of $1 trillion that has been attached.

This enormous expense, added on to the already vast national debt, has been employed to make the argument that it's not worth trying. Leave the insurance and medical industries alone — they control almost a fifth of the economy. You mess with something that big and it's going to cost you.

And besides, nobody wants to have some bureaucrat telling you what doctor you can go to…except, of course, that insurance companies do this to us quite routinely already.

And America has the greatest health care in the world, right? Well no, America doesn't. America stands quite a ways down the line these days, behind those European countries that, like Canada, have a state-sponsored, state-operated or just a cooperative flavor to their health care provision. Of course, if you have gold plated, platinum lined, and diamond dusted health insurance coverage, then yes, you can get fantastic health care right here in the USA. But the funny thing is, the Congressmen and Senators who are deciding all this for us right now, they use a public plan. They depend on the United States government for their health care. And when Senator Charles Grassley was asked why their plan couldn't be expanded to cover other groups of Americans, he snapped back, "then get a job in the US government" if you want his kind of coverage.

But the real fact in all this debate is this: that $1 trillion that the government might spend on health care over the next decade is still going to be spent, because Americans are still going to be suffering from everything from type 2 diabetes to broken noses. And if there's no public plan, then that money will be spent by the usual profit-seeking insurance companies, with well paid executives, and hordes of industry "bureaucrats" denying coverage and rejecting claims.

That $1 trillion will still roll through the medical mills that routinely overuse testing and overcharge for everything. That $1 trillion is still going to come out of our collective hide. In fact, most of it will come out of businesses, our employers. And if they're paying out something like $15,000 a year for our coverage, then that's fifteen grand they're not going to be paying us. Whether they pay it to an insurance company or the government, it's a tax, and in the end we all pay for it.

And pay for it we do, which is why at the end of the day the $1 trillion price tag is nothing more than a political tool to distract and confuse. The real question is what is a better motivator for providing quality healthcare: the quest for profit of a corporation, or the fulfillment of a public mission of a government agency? Who do you want on the other end of the phone when it's your life on the line, a bureaucrat, or a businessman?