A few more weeks...

I've been following the health care bill rather closely, and looking at all the wrangling in the Senate now has reminded me of a question I heard at several health reform conferences in DC over the summer. Panelists at more than one conference were asked, "do you think health care reform will be passed before the year is out?" There were several yeses, several nos, and most concurred that something would happen, but it might not be as comprehensive as was expected. My view at the time was that Congress would ram through an entitlement expansion bill that did little to address costs. Well, looks like I was both right and wrong. This bill is going nowhere before the year is out, but if anything, it will end up as a costly Medicare expansion without cutting costs. But I think there is a reason why so many aspects of the bill have been failing in the Senate over the past week or two. They've cut many of the core aspects of the bill because they represent naive, idealistic liberal theories that do not work in the real world. Just look at the remarks of Sen. Bernie Sanders' remark that the bill "eliminates the hundreds of billions of dollars in waste, administrative costs, bureaucracy and profiteering that is engendered by the private insurance companies." Really? So this bill is saving the nation billions of dollars despite the CBO's estimate of near a trillion dollars? They are trying to ram this bill through, but hopefully our intentionally slow and balky legislative system will weed out the illogical and irresponsible parts of this "reform".