Under the Democratic plan, seniors are even going to lose Medicare choice. A $500 billion reimbursement cutback of Medicare to health care providers would wreck private health care profitability. And other casualties could include the 11 million people in the Medicare Advantage program (which allows insurance choice) and the 8 million in health savings accounts. These will be scrapped under Obama-Baucus.

So we'll be left with the same health care insurance system that is dominated by big government, big business and big insurance companies. Government and the insurance lobby love their oligopolistic powers. But it's exactly these third-party payers who create the supposed free lunch that unnecessarily bloats the expenses of the health care system.

Only the free market will solve our cost problems, doing it in a way that no other government program can.

And speaking of free-market consumer choice and competition, wouldn't it be nice if the 12 million low-income and chronically uninsured folks in America today got vouchers or refundable tax credits so they could shop around for the best plan available?

In fact, to promote real free-market choice, the entire insured population should get a tax break so that everyone can purchase plans on a pre-tax basis, just the way businesses do. And the free-market cost control of government expenses can coexist beautifully with the continued rapid growth of the private health care sector -- which is fast becoming America's No. 1 industry.

In an article for the American Enterprise Institute, Noble Prize winner Robert Fogel argues skillfully for a fast-growing private health sector to accommodate baby-boomer retirements and take advantage of the breathtaking technological gains in health care. He's right. We don't need Malthusian growth-limits on health care. It's an economic-recovery sector. It even created 400,000 new jobs during this deep recession. It now employs 13.7 million people, more than the whole manufacturing sector.

But what we do need is effective consumer choice and market-oriented policies that will control the government's health care sector and prevent it from spending, borrowing, regulating and taxing us to death.