Some recommended reading after Monday morning's historic vote:
New York Times has a good piece on just how toxic the Senate has become.
Tim Jost has two more posts (here and here) on the Health Affairs blog explaining Reid's manager's amendment.
Jacob Hacker on "Why I Still Believe in This Bill," an essay in which one of fiercest defenders of the public option explains why health reform is still ever so worthwhile without it.
The AP's Erica Werner looks at some winners and losers in the fine print (although we wouldn't necessary lump something like Medicaid payments for visiting nurses to homebound elderly with a break for a handful of physician owned hospitals).
Julie Appleby at Kaiser Health News looks at efforts to control medical loss ratios (how much insurers spend on patient care -- and how to define patient care). In a related topic, the Wall Street Journal looks at how nonprofit insurers could avoid a tax if their loss ratios are 92 percent or higher.
An interesting take on the mammography controversy from the Hartford Courant, which reports on a study (by a consulting group) that found that the problem -- overtesting, unnecessary radiation, extra costs, stressful false alarms, unneeded biopsies -- may in part lie with radiologists who misread the breast cancer tests. And it found that about a fourth of the radiologists recall women for extra screening at a higher than average rate. (If Merrill Goozner tells us what's wrong with this study, we'll let you know...) And let's end with this Michael Crowley at TNR;s Plank'se quote of the day Barack Obama: “One of the things that I’ve felt very strongly about during the course of this year is that hard stuff requires not paralysis, but it requires going ahead and trying to make the best of the situation that you’re in.”
Doesn't have quite the same ring as "the fierce urgency of now," does it? And in fact, MLK's next line was this:
"This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism."
Of course, Martin Luther King never met Ben Nelson.
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