Not again.

The Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein has it exactly right about health care. We can’t let things keep going as they are.

Among the range of options for health-care reform, there’s one that is sure to raise your taxes, increase your out-of-pocket medical expenses, swell the federal deficit, leave more Americans without insurance and guarantee that wages will remain stagnant.

That’s the option of doing nothing, letting things continue to drift as they have for the past two decades as we continue to search in vain for the perfect plan that would let everyone have everything they want and preserve everything they already have while getting someone else to pay for it.

So the next time you hear someone throwing a hissy fit because health reform might raise taxes on some people, or steer people into managed care, or require small businesses to contribute $2 a day for each employee’s coverage, just remember to ask yourself: And that’s compared with what?

We got scared and backed off health insurance reform in the ’90s when Bill and Hillary Clinton tried to tackle the problem, and we all know where that’s led us.

What bothers me most, however, about the plan the Democrats have been kicking around is that it is still tied to employment. Having a job and having a need for health care are totally unrelated. Even if you don’t have a traditional employer (maybe, like me, you are your own employer), you still need health care. How did we ever come to expect that the boss would be responsible for making sure our medical procedures and dental appointments are paid for? I won’t even bother mentioning that no other modern government puts this expectation on its business sector. Whoops, I just did.

Health care reform is shelved until after Congress’s August recess. The insurance companies and big pharma won round one (or two, if you count the Clinton loss). We have to make sure they don’t continue winning, because as Pearlstein says, that’s the one sure way the rest of us lose.