I love those Netflix commercials where a quiz show host is asking a nervous contestant timed questions.

“How much wood could a woodchuck chuck?” The contestant blurts out a nonsensical answer: “Flapjacks!” Another question quickly follows: “If a rhombus has four sides, what is the inverse of blue?” The answer: “Purple!”

And so goes the conversation with health care. President Barack Obama keeps bringing up statements like “We need to keep health care costs low.” The Democrats’ answer: Expand government control.

When you go to Sen. Patty Murray’s Web site, she lists her health care priorities in this order:

1. Expanding access.

2. Reining in costs while ensuring quality health care.

3. Decreasing long-term costs through treatment and prevention.

This is pretty typical rhetoric from the “pro-government health care” side of the coin.

Nobody is challenging the rhetoric and the many incoherent assumptions. How do you contain costs while expanding coverage at the same time? How do you “decrease long-term costs through treatment and prevention,” apart from imposing more mandates, which requires more bureaucrats and more enforcement of the mandates, which will raise costs?

Our school districts know this song and dance well, as they are continually burdened with government mandates in the face of shrinking budgets (which gets eaten up by the ever-growing education bureaucracy that has to be hired to enforce the new mandates). The costs of education go up, while teacher salaries and classroom funding goes down. Quality of education goes down, along with graduation rates and test scores.

But let’s look at where government has already attempted to “improve” health care. About three years ago, the news shows were reporting on all the outrages in veterans hospitals (is that “problem” suddenly solved?). More and more doctors are forced to drop their Medicare patients because government reimbursements are so low — it literally costs doctors to treat Medicare patients, forcing them to limit how many Medicare patients they can afford to keep.

The Pacific Research Institute, a non-partisan policy think tank in California, recently conducted a study that revealed that Medicare costs (government managed care) have risen 34 percent more per patient than the costs of all other health care costs from private sources. The study was conducted in such a way as to give Medicare every possible benefit of the doubt. It did not include costs associated with part D, the prescription drug plan, since those have only been in effect since 2006. Still, the results were staggering.

Medicare costs, when all was said and done, increased ten fold since 1970, while privately purchased health care costs increased only four fold. Depending on how you calculated the costs, Medicare costs had increased as much as 60 percent per patient. Privately purchased health care cost increases were significantly lower.

Don’t trust the numbers? Here is how you can get to the bottom line and cut through the political rhetoric. Write to Washington’s U.S. Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, and U.S. Congressman Adam Smith, and simply ask them one question: “I admire your commitment to universal health care for all Americans. Will you opt out of your congressional health care program and sign on to the same one you are imposing on the rest of the country? If you can do this, I know you have our best interest at heart and that this is not just a power grab.”

They are too often quoted on the campaign trail as saying “I want all Americans to enjoy the same benefit Congress enjoys.” Though Congress members all enjoy “taxpayer funded” health care, I guarantee it is not government managed. Currently they enjoy fully funded, cost-is-no-object health care options that will remain the same regardless of what happens to the rest of the country’s options. They need to be called on this.

Go ahead and ask them to sign a pledge. They should volunteer to sign up for the same plan they expect us to live with. If the American public would demand this kind of pledge by their legislators, the nature of the debate will suddenly become crystal clear.

Question: “If an apple a day keeps the doctor away, what keeps the politicians out of your back pocket?” Answer: “A dose of their own medicine!”