"When did the folks of this country become so attention-span challenged and sound-bite addicted?"

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Yeah, copy that. Good post.

My last three blogs posts have been about health care policy reform (link in my name). One of my critics asked told me it was "too much."

Too bad. It is what it is. The topic is complex. $2.5 trillion worth of complex -- 5 times the size of the defense budget (and growing). I've been involved in it for 16 years now, both professionally as a Medicare QIO analyst, and personally as a caregiver, first to my terminally ill daughter, then as POA and guardian to my geriatric parents.

My stuff won't fit on a bumper sticker slogan or Town Hell rally protest rally sign. Too bad.

for the Republicants.

Just wow.

utterly big-picture simple.

Aggregate U.S. "health care" expenditure is now roughly $2.55 trillion per year (and growing rapidly), roughly 5x the amount of the annual DOD budget. We spend roughly 2x per capita relative to our counterpart comparable industrial nations. And, for all that money we rank well down in across-the-board outcomes measures. These are empirical assertions of fact, not ideological mantras.

A lot of people are totally fine with this continuing circumstance. It is profitable to an extent unrivaled by nearly all other areas of the economy.

Look through the current draft of H.R. 3200 (and the last day before House recess amendments). It is [1] a corporate welfare bill (which explains the new Harry & Louise), and [2] an actual "welfare" bill, i.e., myriad provisions for vetting people for means-tested "affordability credits" via which to subsidize the insurance you will be required to buy (enforced by the IRS, btw -- Play or Pay writ large at the individual taxpayer level). See my posts. Link in my name.

Hence all the grassroots and astroturf acrimony. The former cohort pissed at this mammoth new expensive bill that none of the reps are even reading and are yet trying to jam through, the latter determined to kill off "public option" part to preserve their profit levels. Add to that the Republicant obstructionists simply out to hand Obama a major political defeat...

Like I said, at once complex and simple.

Nicely put.

Thanks for that link. Very, very interesting article.

"How can you fund insurance for the uninsured without making cuts somewhere else? And where will those cuts come from?"

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Assumes that the uninsured use no health care services.

"I generally agree with the sentiment that we should just let this sad woman alone and drop all coverage of the paranoid birthers, but still, I can't help wondering how they can literally believe that Obama could have been born in Kenya. Has anyone asked them to explain the logistics of it?"

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You obviously don't get it. Your function is not to ask questions. You are simply to accept her ad nauseum monologue at face value. Anything less axiomatically brands you as part of The Conspiracy.

Recall, he expediently caved on FISA too.