It is widely recognized throughout the health care industry that the United States leads the world in health care spending per capita. However, the chilling dose of reality for American health care consumers is that for all of their spending, the World Health Organization ranks the country's health care system 37th in overall performance--right between Costa Rica and Slovenia. The Institute of Medicine further reports that there are 98,000 deaths in the United States every year due to medical error, and patients are treated according to clinical guidelines only 50 percent of the time. The prognosis is no better for California's public school system. The state's Department of Education reports that health and welfare expenditures by K-12 schools increased $1.3 billion between 1998-1999 and 2002-2003. Annual double-digit increases in health care premiums place administrators in the precarious position of either raiding the general fund budget, passing the cost along to employees or choosing some derivation thereof. It is clear that California's school district administrators can and should play a much larger role in the health care reform discussion to ensure that healthier families send healthier kids to school. Public education in California can and should stand together collectively as employers, employees and as an institution that represents the needs of the students and families, to be an agent of change in the debate over comprehensive health care reform in the state.