Millions, billions, trillions.

These money numbers make your head swim.

How can ordinary citizens like you and me follow, with any sense of comfort, the fiscal gyrations in Washington?

Whatever source of information you consult can be found to conflict with another source that also claims to be accurate.

With this background of fiscal confusion, and despite the pressure for action, now is not the time to make a massive overhaul of the nation’s health care system, which represents some 17% of the nation’s gross national product.

In the interest of both the nation’s physical health and its threatened economy, we cannot afford to make a mistake. We have to be able to proceed with more confidence that what we are doing is the right course.

It could have been the right time to act if steps had already been taken to curtail abuse of medical malpractice lawsuits.

Prior legal permission for competition among insurance companies across state lines, something now forbidden, would also have lowered health insurance costs.

Both of these reasonable incremental steps did not happen because of opposition from powerful special interests.

Timing would have also been better if the widespread fraud now poisoning Medicare and Medicaid, costing billions of wasted dollars, had been stopped.

Given that our health care system can and should be improved — in terms of access, quality and lower costs — we must make the best possible decisions with compassion for those receiving health care as well as due consideration for the roles of health care providers. Overall costs must be fairly shared.

There is understandable doubt that the 1990-page legislation patched together and then offered last week by the House of Representatives answers these needs.