Wednesday signs and portents. Entrails are out, mathematical modeling is in.
NY Times:
The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, said Tuesday night that he and a group of 10 Democratic senators had reached "a broad agreement" to resolve a dispute over a proposed government-run health insurance plan, which has posed the biggest obstacle to passage of sweeping health care legislation.
Don't worry if you don't know or understand every detail. No one else does, either, yet.
WaPo:
Under the deal, the government plan preferred by liberals would be replaced with a program that would create several national insurance policies administered by private companies but negotiated by the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees health policies for federal workers. If private firms were unable to deliver acceptable national policies, a government plan would be created.
In addition, people as young as 55 would be permitted to buy into Medicare, the popular federal health program for retirees. And private insurance companies would face stringent new regulations, including a requirement that they spend at least 90 cents of every dollar they collect in premiums on medical services for their customers.
No socialized health care! And keep your hands off my Medicare!!
David Leonhardt:
Yet every time Congress comes up with an idea for cutting spending, the cry goes out: Patients will suffer! You’re cutting bone, not fat!
How can this be? How can there be billions of dollars of general waste and no specific waste? There can’t, of course.
The only way to cut health care costs is to cut health care costs and, in the process, invite politically potent scare stories.
I’m as skeptical as anyone of the ability of the United States Congress to formulate good policy, but the last few days have offered reason to hope that its members may be summoning the political courage to endure the scare stories.
Absolutely to the point. Even the eternally dithering Senate is getting their act together.
Bart Stupak: Stop picking on me. If you don't get it, let me spell it out: the American people support what I do.
While many accusations have been thrown around in recent months, the intent behind our amendment is simple and clear: to continue current law, which says that there should be no federal financing of abortions. Our intent was not to change, add or take anything away from federal law. This goal is consistent with the opinion of a majority of Americans. Recent CNN and Washington Post-ABC News polls found that 61 percent of Americans do not want taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions. And while the Senate voted down a similar amendment on Tuesday, I’m hopeful that the spirit of our legislation will make it into the final bill.
So forget about outcomes, the only thing that matters is my intent.
Thomas Friedman:
Soon after Suskind’s book came out ["The One Percent Doctrine," a book about the U.S. war on terrorists after 9/11], the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, who then was at the University of Chicago, pointed out that Mr. Cheney seemed to be endorsing the same "precautionary principle" that also animated environmentalists. Sunstein wrote in his blog: "According to the Precautionary Principle, it is appropriate to respond aggressively to low-probability, high-impact events — such as climate change. Indeed, another vice president — Al Gore — can be understood to be arguing for a precautionary principle for climate change (though he believes that the chance of disaster is well over 1 percent.)
And then there's pandemics. The precautionary principle has been applied to SARS in Canada, H5N1 and other infectious disease outbreaks. Earlier in the week:
"I think it is very likely to be the mildest pandemic on record," said Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, who led a federally funded analysis with researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and elsewhere published online Monday by the journal PLoS Medicine.
The analysis, based on data collected in New York City and Milwaukee, indicates that the virus might directly cause between 6,000 and 45,000 deaths by the end of the winter, with the final toll probably falling somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000, Lipsitch said.
In the worse-case scenario, the swine flu pandemic would claim no more than about 60,000 lives, Lipsitch's new analysis concluded.
Even if the overall death toll does end up being relatively low, several experts noted that the pandemic has already taken an unusually high tally among children and young adults.
Because seniors, who have the hightest death rates, are not widely affected, we have been lucky so far. it's of course, not over, but the point is at the beginning, you can't know what it looks like at the end. That's why Lipsitch and the PCAST reportwere accused of being alarmist by discussing the range of illness possible (and those who confused that for a prediction are just that: confused.)
On the Republican Presidential sweepstakes:
Someone writing for Sarah Palin: Weather forecasters who work in rooms without windows are ruining America.
Kathleen Parker:
Is Rick Santorum running for president of the United States, or isn't he?
Michael Gerson:
If it weren't for bad luck, Mike Huckabee would have no luck at all. Of all the deranged criminals in the country, it was Maurice Clemmons -- granted clemency by then-Gov. Huckabee of Arkansas almost a decade ago -- who recently murdered four police officers in Washington state. Seldom has an act of mercy been more publicly or horribly betrayed.
By Sarah Palin.