Protected by oceans and a strong military, America has faced relatively few serious domestic threats in its still-young lifetime.

But some consider the Democrats' massive health-care "reform" effort to be one of the gravest.

Why? For some very good reasons.

For one thing, this country is already well on the way to financial insolvency. Our debt is about $12 trillion, we're adding over $1 trillion a year right now -- and future unfunded costs of Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid are in the neighborhood of $100 trillion.

We're broke. And yet, the Democratic Congress is barreling toward another $1 trillion health-care entitlement we can't afford.

Even the Chinese, perhaps our best creditors, are balking at our out-of-control spending. And we seem to be on the road toward currency failure and hyperinflation, a path taken by the Weimar Republic and others in history.

Yet, the threat to our financial system, as mammoth as it is, is dwarfed by the threat to our freedoms. One economist has estimated the federal government is now in control of 30 percent of the U.S. economy. Adding health care would increase its control to about 48 percent.

That's not the America you grew up in.

As deliberation of the nearly 2,000-page Nancy Pelosi health-care bill nears late this week, Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., called on Americans to show up at the Capitol on Thursday for a massive "House Call," as a show of unity to oppose what The Wall Street Journal flat-out called "the worst bill ever."

Thousands of Tea Party activists converged on the Capitol, unleashing shouts of "Kill the bill!" and "You work for us!"

That sentiment also is being reflected among independent voters, who The Washington Post said "are wary of (President) Obama's far-reaching proposals and mounting spending, as well as the growing federal debt."

Remember, these same independents helped elect Obama last year. And now they realize in a moment of clarity that health care as pushed by the Democrats would financially break this country, and give its people a flawed program that a majority clearly doesn't want.

"In two months, (Democrats have) forgotten the message that the American people sent loud and clear in August," Bachmann said.

We're not so sure.

We don't think they listened to begin with.

The result: The House speaker has put her weight behind a bill that the House Republican Conference claims creates 111 new federal bureaucracies.

"This is so important," Bachmann told HumanEvents.com, "because this health care vote represents the crown jewel of socialism -- socialized medicine is the crown jewel of socialism."

The Wall Street Journal worries the Pelosi bill or some other incarnation of reform will create "a new and probably unrepealable middle-class entitlement that is designed to expand over time. Taxes will need to rise precipitously, even as ObamaCare so dramatically expands government control of health care that eventually all medicine will be rationed via politics.

"Mr. Obama rode into office on a wave of 'change,' " the Journal concludes, "but we doubt most voters realized that the change Democrats had in mind was making health care even more expensive and rigid than the status quo. Critics will say we are exaggerating, but we believe it is no stretch to say that Mrs. Pelosi's handiwork ranks with the Smoot-Hawley tariff and FDR's National Industrial Recovery Act as among the worst bills Congress has ever seriously contemplated."

Sounds like a pretty serious threat to us.