It took the House nearly 2,000 pages to draft a health care reform bill. Vermont Sen. Bernard Sanders needed far less paper to come up with a bill calling for the breakup of failing financial institutions within a year.

Sanders introduced the "Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist Act" on Friday. In just two pages, he outlined a simple remedy to avoid a repeat of last year’s massive taxpayer-funded bailouts.

If enacted, the bill would give Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner 90 days to "submit to Congress a list of all commercial banks, investment banks, hedge funds and insurance companies that the Secretary believes are too big to fail."

The treasury secretary would then have one year to "break up entries listed on the Too Big To Fail List, so that their failure would no longer cause a catastrophic effect on the United States or global economy without a taxpayer bailout."

"If an institution is too big to fail, it is too big to exist," Sanders told Bloomberg News last week."We should end the concentration of ownership that has resulted in just four huge financial institutions holding half the mortgages in America, controlling two-thirds of the credit cards, and amassing 40 percent of all deposits," Sanders said, citing Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co. "We should break them up so they are no longer in a position to bring down the entire economy."

Rep. Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa., who is chairman of a House Financial Services Committee panel on capital markets, said last week that he is considering introducing a similar measure in the House that would break up large financial firms.

"Nowhere in the world in the future will there be gigantic tsunamis coming out of nowhere and striking the entire world’s economy," he told Bloomberg News last week.

Naturally, the financial world opposes any attempt to rein in the considerable power it now has over the global economy. But Sanders is absolutely right about breaking up the financial behemoths whose rapacious behavior almost plunged the world into a depression.

Back in the 1990s, when Congress passed legislation removing regulatory limits on financial institutions, Sanders was one of the few who warned that deregulating the financial industry could lead to disaster.

But breaking up the big banks is not enough. We also need a return to the kind of financial regulation that was imposed in the 1930s, starting with a restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933.

Back then, after wild speculation ended with the stock market crash of 1929 that brought on the Great Depression, the Roosevelt administration pushed for restraints on Wall Street. Glass-Steagall separated government-insured commercial banks and the non-federally backed investment banks. By keeping consumer and speculative capital separate, it made it possible to understand the activities of all financial organizations.

In 1999, Congress repealed Glass-Steagall and replaced it with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. It allowed the stockbrokers, insurance companies and banks to merge for the first time since the 1930s, and ushered in a new era of financial irresponsibility.

By reinstating the regulatory firewalls that were ripped down a decade ago, re-regulating the energy markets to end rampant speculation in oil and regulating or abolishing the various financial instruments that are at the heart of the current financial crisis, we can avoid having to pay for another costly bailout.