Everyone knew fixing health care wasn't going to be cheap, but it looks like it might be cheaper than we think...

...America's current health care system wastes considerably more than a trillion dollars every year. We know that because countries such as France, Germany, Japan and Finland, with comparable standards of living to ours, spend roughly half what the United States spends annually on health care per citizen, while covering everyone and achieving better results. So if the total cost of American health care over the coming decade reaches $40 trillion, as economists expect, then we will be "wasting" approximately $20 trillion, or $2 trillion a year.

Compared with figures such as those, the CBO scoring estimate of $1.6 trillion over 10 years to reform the U.S. health care system is so small as to be almost negligible. Constantly hearing numbers that sound so large makes perspective even more important. When Princeton health economist Uwe Reinhardt actually did the simple calculations, he found that the price of reform amounted to only 4 percent of the country's cumulative health care budget between next year and 2020. He noted that this amount is much less than the annual increase in health care spending over the past 10 years. And he also pointed out that on the broader economic horizon, that $1.6 trillion represents only about 1 percent of the $170 trillion in gross domestic product that Americans will produce over the same period.