Amused.

And as always, to delight us all, the Vice President of the United States:

Approved.

From http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4007/4458527284_21d7409410.jpg

From Fallows

Health-Care Reform, the Morning After – Politics – The Atlantic.

Fallows quoting a reader who has been denied insurance coverage by private insurers because of a chronic condition:

Until tonight, I have been a Democrat because of people like Gingrich and Bush, Palin and Pawlenty. After tonight, I am an Obama Democrat in the sense that my grandparents were Roosevelt Democrats. For all the problems with HCR, for all the compromises and deals and disappointments and inefficiencies, tonight the Democrats stood up and took a political risk to say that I deserve medical coverage, that it’s no longer okay to treat my health as sad but acceptable collateral damage in a Social Darwinist system. That’s why this moment matters to me.

“…I am an Obama Democrat in the sense that my grandparents were Roosevelt Democrats.”

That about sums it up.

Mark those 21 march calendars!

219-212.

I have nothing to say that James Fallows, Ezra Klein, among many, many others haven’t said. In fact, Fallows says it so well that I’ll let him do the talking (next post). There’s a one-man live band playing French folk music outside my window, walking the street. A man with a trumpet and a cassette player. Love spring in Paris.

Quote of the day.

“‘When we have a bill,” she said, ”you can bake the pie, you can sell the pie. But you have to have a pie to sell.”

Nancy Pelosi, on passing health care legislation without Republicans.

From Ezra Klein.

The quotable Pelosi will not let healthcare die:

Yesterday, Nancy Pelosi was asked about health-care reform at a small gathering of writers and columnists. Her reply:

I’ve said to my colleagues, go in the door. The door’s locked? Go to the gate. The gate’s locked? Climb over the fence. It’s too high? Pole vault in. That doesn’t work? Parachute in. We have to get this done for the American people one way or another.

Now, compare that to how the Senate is talking.

Amateur trying to understand healthcare.

NPR, All Things Considered, did a piece that presented opposing views on healthcare reform.

Two speakers: Professor Uwe Reinhardt of Princeton and Gail Wilensky, who was “White House health policy adviser to President George H.W. Bush, ran Medicare and Medicaid and later served as an adviser on health policy to Senator John McCain during his run for the White House.” So she’s a Republican.

Mis-handled by overeager Dems? Quite possibly. A 60-vote supermajority makes people giddy.

SIEGEL: Let’s say the Republicans say, you know what’s always near the top of our list when it comes to health care. It’s tort reform. It’s reforming the system of malpractice insurance in the country, which President Obama only went so far as to say, okay, maybe some pilot projects to look at alternative ways of dispute resolution.

Are the Democrats capable, or would it be worth it, even if it’s for a small share of the health care dollars, to meet the Republicans halfway on that question?

Prof. REINHARDT: I think they should have. I think at the very least it was discourteous not to have done it. But I believe the recent CBO report on malpractice shows it would actually yield savings if we had major reform. There are some great ideas out on this. They’ve been out, actually, for 20 or more years. It’s called alternative dispute resolution that takes this roulette wheel of jury rooms out of the proceedings and separates whether a patient got hurt and needs help from whether a physician was negligent.

All of these ideas are out there. And for a comprehensive health insurance bill not to have embraced that facet of it is actually rather inexcusable.

Something must be done:

SIEGEL: Do you think there are Republican votes for such bills?

Dr. WILENSKY: It will be hard. It will be harder now than it would’ve been a year ago. There’s a lot of jaundiced views. People like Orrin Hatch, who have had a history of being a part of bipartisan bills, walked away very angrily from what was going on in the Senate, one of the great losses that Senator Kennedy was not actively involved in the health care reform debate. It’s possible. It will be hard. It’s worth the effort.

SIEGEL: If the alternative to all of this – if one possible alternative is status quo, how bad is that?

Dr. WILENSKY: It’s very bad. We have challenges we must take on. Fifteen percent of the population, almost 50 million, about 45 million right now without health insurance coverage is a serious problem to the individuals and the communities where they live. And it’s wrong.

But we also have, for all of us that have coverage, unsustainable growth in health care spending, already at 17 percent of our GDP and growing. And we have a lot of quality problems. We don’t get what we need at the right time with patient safety measures. We really have to take these issues on, and they’re hard. They won’t be easy to fix.