Congress should not be in a hurry as it overhauls the industry responsible for one-sixth of the spending in our economy.

Don't get us wrong: Health-care reform in America is essential and must be accomplished soon. With more than 50 million Americans uninsured and with health-care costs and insurance premiums rising into the stratosphere, our economy faces real trouble if we can't fix the problems and get affordable health care to more Americans.

The current situation is hurting individuals, businesses and states from one end of the country to another.

Health-care reform is the signature initiative of President Barack Obama. He spent much of his time on the campaign trail promising to deliver health care to more Americans. Operating under a political calculation that such politically risky reform must be done before many members of Congress face re-election next year, Obama has demanded that a bill be voted on before the mid-August congressional recess.

That's too soon.

Given the complexity of the job, we agree with Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, who told the president after meeting with him last week that, "We must calibrate the speed of our action on this monumental issue to the necessity to get this right."

Snowe, along with Maine's other Republican senator, Susan Collins, is part of a growing chorus of centrists on both sides of the aisle pushing the Obama administration and its congressional allies to slow down.

That request may be a political maneuver, but it's also a necessary move to ensure that proper care is taken when making such crucial change.

Health-care reform will affect every American. Such reform will likely cost more than $1 trillion over the next decade. It is a task of immense proportions, procedurally, substantively and politically. The vested interests are numerous and powerful and have already pulled lawmakers in many different directions. Partisan political rhetoric about health-care reform is increasingly shrill and sometimes unhinged, and it threatens to stymie any significant progress.

These are the elements we believe must be part of any health-care reform legislation:

* It must expand quality health-care coverage to a large proportion of those Americans not now insured.

* It must stem rising costs.

* It must not add to the deficit.

But the legislation currently being debated by congressional committees -- one bill in the Senate and three in the House -- does not reduce federal health spending by a significant amount. That was the politically devastating analysis delivered last week in Congress by the head of the Congressional Budget Office -- testimony that contradicted legislation sponsors' promises that the measure did, indeed, rein in spending.

Without cutting costs, the current legislation doesn't do the job and certainly doesn't merit the label "reform." The House has proposed to pay for the cost of their plan with a tax on the wealthy; that's hardly likely to get through the Senate and needs revision. But the Obama administration stands firmly with its allies in labor against another way of paying for reform, which is to tax health-care benefits. They're blocking any movement toward that solution.

These are among the many reasons why it's important for lawmakers to slow down the pell-mell rush to get health-care reform through Congress. We don't have a bill yet that will cut costs and we don't have a way yet to pay for the proposed reform.

Sounds like time to start again.