By host Tom Ashbrook:

Here’s a question: How do we know when the health care crisis — spiraling costs and millions of uninsured — is really coming to the crunch?

Well, maybe, when it’s getting so bad that our leaders are starting to do something about it. More than a decade after the failed Clinton initiative through health care reform into the deep freeze, new reform initiatives are busting out all over.

The states are diving from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s California. And this week, the President is calling for taxing some employee health benefits to help other Americans get coverage. So, is this the way? Or a shell game?

This hour On Point: the new push on health care, and what it may mean for you.

Guests:

Marilyn Werber Serafini , Health reporter for the National Journal

Phillip Swagel, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy, former Chief of Staff for the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers

Dr. Arnold Relman, Emeritus Professor of Medicine and Social Medicine at the Harvard Medical School, the forthcoming book “A Second Opinion: The Impending Collapse of the Healthcare System and How to Prevent It” and a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine

Joseph Antos, Health Care and Retirement Policy expert at the American Enterprise Institute, Commissioner of the Maryland Health Services Cost Review Commission, former Assistant Director for Health and Human Resources at the Congressional Budget Office and author of “Private Discounts, Public Subsidies: How the Medicare Prescription Drug Discount Card Really Works”

Herb Schultz, Senior Health Policy Advisor to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.