As the debate over health care reform focuses on bills in the House and Senate, increasing criticism is reflecting public anxiety over the failure of current reform proposals to control health care spending.

Mortimer Zuckerman, editor-in- chief of U.S. News & World Report, titled his most recent commentary "The 'reform' that ate America." He warns that the costs associated with current health care reform proposals will "take us over a cliff," and none of the plans "offer credible solutions for reining in the runaway cost inflation that is crippling us."

While Congress has mostly debated how best to expand coverage, Zuckerman notes that 61 percent of Americans are more concerned with the high cost of health care than covering the uninsured.

Last month, the Wall Street Journal featured a column titled "Health 'reform' gets a failing grade." In the commentary, Dr. Jeffrey Flier, dean of the Harvard Medical School, argued that the rhetoric on both sides of the health care debate is "exaggerated and often deceptive."

It appears that Congress, in crafting the current bills, has been listening to mostly the special interests of health insurers, drug makers, hospitals and doctors. These groups employ an army of lobbyists to make their case on health reform — and to protect their profits.

Flier refers to this bias when he notes, "Those of us for whom the central issue is health — not politics — have been left in the lurch.

Speeches and news reports can lead you to believe that proposed congressional legislation would tackle the problem of cost, access and quality. But that's not true."

Commenting on the current versions of health care reform in the House and the Senate, Flier says "there are no provisions to substantively control the growth of costs or raise the quality of care. So the overall effort will fail to qualify as reform."

Flier argues that the latest efforts will only make our health care problems worse, saying "current federal legislation would undermine any potential for real innovation in insurance and the provision of care. It would do so by overregulating the health care system in the service of special interests such as insurance companies, hospitals, professional organizations and pharmaceutical companies, rather than patients who should be our primary concern."

It's become increasingly clear that Congress is more responsive to the lobbyists, and maybe campaign contributions from the special interests, than to health care professionals like Flier.

In Sunday's Butler Eagle, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer argued that Congress should kill the current bills and start over. He pointed out that two simple provisions for reducing health care spending — tort reform and increasing price competition by allowing health insurance to be sold across state lines — are missing from the 4,000 pages of health reform contained in the House and Senate bills.

Zuckerman and others also stress the need to change the fee-for-service approach, which builds in profit incentives for doctors and hospitals to do more procedures than are medically necessary. And the fear of medical malpractice, which tort reform would address, also creates incentives for unnecessary tests and procedures.

It probably is not a coincidence that the United States, which pays nearly twice as much for health care as other nations on a per-capita basis, is the only advanced nation using a fee-for-service system. Zuckerman notes that "our perverse system of reimbursement so warps incentives for doctors, insurers and patients that we consume more and more medical services."

As Congress intensifies debate over health care reform, the emphasis should shift from expanding coverage to reducing spending, and the experiences of other countries offer many opportunities for savings.

Otherwise, health care spending will continue to rise faster than inflation — and wages — and will only accelerate the nation on its course toward bankruptcy, made worse in the past year by trillions of dollars in federal bailouts and stimulus spending. The health care proposals in Congress create massive new entitlements with only vague promises of future cost reductions.

The Concord Coalition, a bipartisan budget group, says the two health care bills contain "not much reform" and are mostly "a big entitlement expansion, plus tax increases."

White House officials and too many Democrats in Congress seem intent on passing something they can call "health care reform" for mostly political reasons. It's encouraging to see mounting criticism of the current proposals to address costs, but stopping the political momentum will be difficult.

The public will have to speak up, and loudly, to prevent current and future taxpayers from being steamrolled by health care reform that puts special interests first.