Whatever your views on the current health care reform debate, it's clearly one of the more divisive issues to come along.
But while we are arguing about health coverage, health issues and how to improve medical care, potentially more important issues are being ignored.
Even if the current attempt at redirecting health policy were settled quickly, and hoped for lower costs of the medical care system achieved, it will be the wrong priority at this crucial moment.
Here's why:

• With staggering debt and little more borrowing capacity, the economy needs both cost reduction and revenue growth.
  No matter what the outcome of improving the health system, it will not by itself, be an engine of economic growth.
  
• Health issues, health coverage and health system reform, while attention-getting, are not inspirational.
   With incendiaries like "death camps," and "illegal immigrant coverage," there's little currently that can unify and rally us toward a common goal in health reform.
  
• While it does affect everyone eventually, the group that matters most to America's future, our youth, is understandably uninterested in health policy.
  Except for the issue of their having to pay for health insurance and the cost of health reform via taxes, the need for health care in this arguably healthy group is low.
  

So where should President Obama have focused his reform leadership: Alternative energy development.
Unlike health care, it would be both a cost saver (we send a trillion dollars or so to the Middle East every year), and an economic development tool.
Consider the new industries, new products and services that would spring up if energy were abundant and cheap.
Much like the coming of our ancestors to a new land that had timber, land, oil, and water, enlarged energy resources would spur a revolution in how we live and what we do.
And beyond the crying ecological need for clean energy, the focus on creating means of alternative energy and energy saving could have immediate effect.
For instance, seemingly only second in public attention to the  health care debate is the near universal popularity of the "cash for clunkers" program, which has helped battled companies like GM actually start increasing their auto production again.
With its immediate recall from layoffs of production workers, that's instant economic development.
But more importantly, it shows the effect of improving gas mileage on a challenged environment.
Government figures indicate cars and trucks purchased averaged 15.
8 miles per gallon, compared with 25.
4 miles per gallon for the old ones.
That's a 61 percent increase in efficiency.
  (And of course the potential benefit and savings of wiping away a political/military presence in the Middle East has vast implications as well.
) This program is just a gesture compared to the potential for creating high level sustainable economic growth from wind, solar, hydrogen and geothermal energy -- all renewable, domestic resources.
Plus talk about a vision! It's the perfect inspiration for a generation who's main job will be to transform our unsustained, pollution-making, resource-using current methods into balanced, sustainable systems.
The challenge and the creativity of youth will be more than enough, if channeled, recognized and invested in.
Plus the learning needed to create the requisite high level skills will help another burning issue: The reform of our educational system.
The bottom line: Make health care reform a priority, but make it second to energy reform.
The priority is clear.
The potential is astounding.