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Tony Ondrusek is founder and publisher of Insurance & Financial Advisor and IFAwebnews.com.

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Someone has to say it: The foiled terrorism attempt on a Detroit-bound airplane on Christmas day just about buried any potential press coverage of the health care reform bill passed by the Senate the day before. And a news diversion from their actions last week could prove beneficial to some Democrats who don’t want America talking about the health care reform fiasco.

For most of the weekend following Christmas, and into this current week, news coverage has been almost exclusively on the terrorism attempt. From every major TV network to all national newspapers, none have strayed from the coverage.

The Sunday talk shows — Meet the Press, This Week, Fox News Sunday, Face the Nation and CNN’s State of the Union — had all publicized extensive coverage of the legislation passed by the Senate. Experts and pundits were lined up and ready to go.

And you can believe that the major newspapers had front-page stories ready for the weekend — the reporters had posted their stories before the Christmas holiday, and didn’t expect any other major news during the traditionally very slow news period.

So America was poised to continue debating over the weekend and into this week the health care reform issue.

But then along comes a Nigerian terrorist, and the issue moves to the inside of the paper and basically off the airwaves.

No more talk about the biggest economic upheaval story in the past year, or for years to come. (No, the current recession, I believe, is not as big, at least at the current time. We can recover from the recession, but the changes in health care have the potential to not only change and damage our economy but also our culture, and could be irreversible.)

Now, all TV and news coverage, and all the Sunday talk shows that give us our “sound bites” for the coming week, is off health care and onto terrorism.

Please, don’t comment and write that I have said that Democrats wanted or approved of the terrorism threat. That is the farthest from the truth. In no way do I think that any of them would have wanted any danger to anyone.

But if the Senate and House Democrats, and President Obama, could have wished for a diversion from the health care debate, they could not have hoped for anything better. A terrorism plot that was thwarted, with only minor injuries to those heroic passengers who stopped the culprit, coupled with a usual slow period of news coverage that leaves editors and reporters looking for something big to report on, and BAM!, health care reform is now a second-page story.