If Barack Obama called this fourth-quarter play, it has the look of a game changer on health care reform. Or was it Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid -- or, more likely, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has pushed hardest for true reform as the clock winds down?

With a late Hail Mary play -- or was it a flea flicker or a faked field goal? -- at last the Democrats seem poised to drive across the goal line toward real reform.

Without a public option to private health insurance, that goal would be uncrossable, and because there would be little or no chance of controlling runaway health care costs, it would be doomed to fail. Exactly what opponents in the insurance industry hope will happen. Then they can get back to business as usual with no worries.

If Democrats can establish a public option this year, no matter how weak the format, there will be a real alternative for basic health care insurance.

Those who wring their hands in worry that the poor insurance industry won't be able to compete with a public entity -- something worthy of music from the world's smallest violin -- they need only look at Medicare. That government program provides a public option for all seniors but at a basic, cost-controlling level. In other words, the program squeezes care-givers to charge less for services than they might grab on the open market.

This still leaves plenty of room for private policies to provide extra services and fill gaps in coverage. Millions

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of seniors on Medicare have such supplemental policies, which are analogous to a key component of the French health care system -- judged the best in the world.

What they have, and the United States should have, is a Medicare-style program for all, meaning that, unlike us, there aren't millions of French citizens lacking any coverage.

Why we can't adopt a similar system of public-private insurance must be unfathomable to anyone unfamiliar with America's irrational love affair with "the free market," even when it lets us down horribly and/or screws over everyone not at the top of the economic food chain.

A too wide open marketplace is not unlike a World Series without umpires, in which the Steinbrenners would necessarily always win. Just the right combination of public and private should be our goal in all things, especially in major federal legislation. If he needs to, the president should pull out the old Statue of Liberty play to get that done, which would be more than appropriate.