Health care overhaul and the jobs picture — and how each could affect the 2010 midterm elections — prompted a little sparring Sunday between two ex-governors who both ran for president.

In a Nov. 23 interview with the Huffington Post, Howard Dean said the Senate Democratic leadership was “in deep trouble” on health care, even after Majority Leader Harry Reid , D-Nev., managed to get the 60 votes needed to get legislation to the floor.

“I think if you passed the Senate bill tomorrow it would be OK. But then the problem is they don’t have any defense for their members in 2010,” Dean said in the interview, noting that the public option would not become operational until 2014. “On the other hand, if they drop the public option [to placate moderate members], I think they lose seats.”

Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Dean, who was governor of Vermont from 1991 to 2002 and ran for president in 2004, said, “I think it’s tough right now. We’ve got to get a decent bill with a public option in it so that we don’t — aren’t forced into this — what we’ve been forced into for the last 30 years.

“Look, insurance companies take 27 percent off the top. They don’t do a terribly good job,” he said. “The costs have been going up at 2.5 times the rate of inflation. And the Democratic base expects, as we say, change you can believe in. And so I think ... Harry Reid has got a real problem on his hands, and he’s got to get these folks to pass a decent bill.”

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a 2008 presidential candidate, also appearing on the Fox program, said the problem with health care in the United States is not “a health care crisis” but rather “a health crisis.”

“I think the critical area has to be to move toward a preventive-based system rather than what we currently have, which is intervention at the catastrophic level,” he said. “Eighty percent of the $2.5 trillion we spend on health care in this country is spent on chronic disease. We really don’t have a health care crisis ... We have a health crisis.”

Using the example of “an NFL football game, 22 people on the field in desperate need of rest, 70,000 people in the stands in desperate need of exercise,” Huckabee said, “If we don’t address this fundamental difference between the health and unhealthiness of the American population, we can spend all kinds of money, but we’re never going to spend our way into a system that will be functional and affordable.”

Dean agreed with Huckabee’s assessment of a preventive vs. illness-based health system but the two differed on the government-run health care plan known as the public option.

“Here’s the problem with the insurance reform in the House and the Senate bills. You can still charge two, three or four times as much to sick people as you do to healthy people,” he said. “ Now, I know Mike and I disagree about the public option, but I think people ought to have a choice.

“We have a socialist system of health care in this country that’s called the Veterans Administration,” he said. “It’s the number one rated health care system by its consumers of any system in the country, private or public. We have a single payer in this country. It’s called Medicare. Most people like it.

“But why can’t we have a choice between the private system, between the so-called single-payer system of Medicare and between the socialized system of the Veterans Administration? Give us choices. Those are the kinds of choices that will make a health care system better.”

Huckabee responded that “the one fear that I have about a public option is if you have the entire system subsidized by the federal government, then you put one entity — in this case, the government — ultimately in control. And more people, particularly small business owners, are going to be forced into that system because they can’t compete.”