The Barack Obama campaign has been lying about the John McCain health plan, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone. The political discussion about health insurance is pretty much a fabrication from beginning to end.

Yes, there are serious flaws in the system and we need to correct them, but listen to what politicians are saying and you will hear over and over again about the people who lack "health care," as if a lack of insurance means no care whatsoever. That's just not true, and it's not true, either, that there are 47 million citizens in this country who simply cannot get insurance no matter what they do.

The figure's hard to nail down, but one student of the subject tells me it is closer to 10 million. That 47 million number includes about 11 million illegal aliens, millions of people who can afford accessible health insurance and yet don't buy it and still more millions who are eligible for Medicaid and other programs but for some reason have never signed up.

It's also a fact, as a Heritage Foundation analyst documented a few years ago, that when tough circumstances do rip health insurance from someone's grasp, it's seldom for long, usually something under six months, and that those forced to go without it for much more extended periods represent a minute percentage of the population.

Given all the balderdash on the subject, it was as sure as underhanded electioneering that Barack Obama and friends would contend that McCain wants to tax the untaxed health benefits you get from your employer and leave it at that, leading the innocent to a terrible thought -- pretty much for the fun of it, this guy McCain is going to wreck my life.

The truth is that McCain wants to quit giving as many health insurance tax breaks to employers and give them instead to individuals, and that all kinds of good could flow from the concept. If you obtained your insurance from, say, a pool at your church and you lost your job, you would still have your insurance. Experts note you would have options besides whatever your company offered or if your company offered nothing.

And because McCain proposes to mostly make up for the new liberating, refundable tax credit with a new tax on employer health insurance, the costs of the program are held down.

Oh dear, say Obama and Democrats generally, employers will then quit offering health insurance, but as David Gratzer of the Manhattan Institute pointed out in a Wall Street Journal piece, that's already been happening because of escalating costs, and as others argue, it could ultimately happen under the Obama plan, which could be a disaster only the bold of heart should contemplate.

He wants a government option for people and sooner or later, some wise observers predict, that option would be the only show in town, which is to say the costs would be enormous beyond even current high estimates, and we would have bureaucratically imposed limits on care.

Both Obama and McCain have been faulted for not providing enough details about their plans. I don't blame either one for that. Making too many specific and precise promises in the heat of a campaign could put you in a bind later on or make you go back on your word.

Any plan would be amended a hundred ways in Congress, at any rate. The main thing is to know whether a candidate's proposed march is in the direction of socialized medicine or a market-based system, and that's clear in these two cases.

The next step is to better explain the overall situation to the public and end political distortions. That might be too much to hope for.

• Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay@aol.com.

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