The Seattle Times is hardly a bastion of conservatism. Michelle Malkin worked there back in the day and she says it was a left-wing rag even back then. And as anyone who has followed media bias for any length of time can testify, the Times can’t quite be counted on to support Republican initiatives.

But today even that left-wing paper is calling for Congress and the White House to abandon their push for government-run health care. In an editorial published today, the paper calls for Democrats to pull the plug on their own massive government agenda.

This is a change of position for us. This page supported Barack Obama for president, enthusiastically. We have supported the health-care effort until now. We still support universal coverage as a social goal.

But the longer the fight goes on, the more it feels that the timing is all wrong. The economy is wounded. Employers are hurting. The time to think about loading employers with new burdens is when they are strong. Not now…

President Obama has promised that any health-care bill he signs will not add one dime to the deficit, which already has swelled beyond anything since World War II. The president has put himself in a position where he cannot keep that promise. He has let each house of Congress come up with its own health-care bills.

The result has been chaos: The public option is in then out; the Medicare buy-in for 55-year-olds is in, then out. When the congressional dance stops, the Senate may have 60 votes, but for what? It will satisfy neither Obama’s frugal promise nor progressives’ lavish hopes. Already the Democratic Party’s former chairman, Howard Dean, says the bill is not worth passing in this form.

You know he’s right when you hear statements that something has to be passed, for political reasons. This issue is too important for that. It should wait for a unified proposal and an economy on the mend.

Basically, The Seattle Times is saying what the rest of America has for a year now. We do need health care reform, but we need the right kind of reform. Right now Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats are just ramming through government-run health care for political reasons. They can’t stand the thought of not getting what they want immediately.

America deserves better. America deserves real solutions that will actually lower health care costs, maintain the doctor-patient decision relationship, keep government rationing away, and allow for greater choice in the marketplace. But that’s not what this current legislation accomplishes. In fact, the bill currently before Congress is only likely to make the problem worse.

Congress needs to revert to concentrating on job creation policies, but that doesn’t mean it has to abandon health care reform. Members should go back to the drawing board and seek a bipartisan consensus on reform. The current version of health care reform should be defeated.