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Watch this video of a joint “town hall” appearance by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Senator Arlen Specter, and see what happens when Specter talks about legislators making judgments “very fast.”

Do you think the public is unhappy with the way Congress and the Obama Administration are handling health care reform?

(HT: Instapundit, who has several more highly-recommended links.)

From Krauthammer’s column in today’s Washington Post:

“This is not about politics? Then why is it, to take but the most egregious example, that in this grand health-care debate we hear not a word about one of the worst sources of waste in American medicine: the insane cost and arbitrary rewards of our malpractice system?

“When a neurosurgeon pays $200,000 a year for malpractice insurance before he even turns on the light in his office or hires his first nurse, who do you think pays? Patients, in higher doctor fees to cover the insurance.

“And with jackpot justice that awards one claimant zillions while others get nothing — and one-third of everything goes to the lawyers — where do you think that money comes from? The insurance companies, which then pass it on to you in higher premiums.

“But the greatest waste is the hidden cost of defensive medicine: tests and procedures that doctors order for no good reason other than to protect themselves from lawsuits. Every doctor knows, as I did when I practiced years ago, how much unnecessary medical cost is incurred with an eye not on medicine but on the law.

“Tort reform would yield tens of billions in savings. Yet you cannot find it in the Democratic bills. And Obama breathed not a word about it in the full hour of his health-care news conference. Why? No mystery. The Democrats are parasitically dependent on huge donations from trial lawyers.”

Unlike too many conservatives, I recognize that the health care system’s financial problems are multi-faceted, and that tort reform will not be a cure-all by any means. But it is inexcusable that the subject of tort reform is not even on the table.  Heck, it’s not even in the same building as the table.

The Mayo Clinic posted this commentary on the Congressional plan that was released a couple of days ago:

“Although there are some positive provisions in the current House Tri-Committee bill – including insurance for all and payment reform demonstration projects – the proposed legislation misses the opportunity to help create higher-quality, more affordable health care for patients. In fact, it will do the opposite.

“In general, the proposals under discussion are not patient focused or results oriented. Lawmakers have failed to use a fundamental lever – a change in Medicare payment policy – to help drive necessary improvements in American health care. Unless legislators create payment systems that pay for good patient results at reasonable costs, the promise of transformation in American health care will wither. The real losers will be the citizens of the United States.”

I really dislike the Tri-Committee bill, so I agree with what Mayo says.  Their take also seems consistent with what Atul Gawande said in this New Yorker article, “The Cost Conundrum,” which I found presuasive.  I think, however, that the conservatives who are so gleeful about Mayo’s statement should keep in mind that Mayo’s criticism of the Tri-Committee bill is pretty narrow:  Medicare payment policy still encourages more care, rather than the right care.  It would not be hard to amend the Tri-Committee bill to at least attempt to do that, which would be a bad thing.  As a small-government guy, I worry about the federal government trying to exercise oversight over medical decisions.

EVERYONE WHO IS FOLLOWING the debate over the massive health care policy proposals in Congress, and is wondering what the term “public option” means, should read Hugh Hewitt’s post today.  It tells you everything you need to know.  Excerpt:

The fundamental dishonesty [in President Obama's defense of his plan] is that the president refuses to acknowledge that the government option/public plan will be subsidized by the federal government in a number of ways and thus will be cheaper for employers to choose for their employees, and they will choose it, sending tens of millions of Americans now covered by private insurers into the public plan, dramatically driving up federal costs while crippling the private sector insurance industry.  Once dumped into the plan, the employees will wonder what happened to the president’s promise — often repeated — that “if you like your plan you can keep it.”

Read the whole thing, and send it to your friends.  Most important, call members of Congress and the Senate.  Hugh’s post gives you all the phone numbers.

I think it’s too early to say, but Reuters Blogs’ James Pethokoukis thinks so.  He asks and answers his own question: “So what happened?”

“How is it possible that Democrats cruised to a huge victory on Election Day in November 2008 and are yet again unable to make good on their top legislative priority? Why are the ghosts of Bill Clinton’s 1994 healthcare reform debacle suddenly flitting about Capitol Hill? What happened was the Great Recession, the political impact of which the Obamacrats completely misunderstood. Oh, they knew the financial and economic crisis helped sweep them to office. That part they got just fine.”

What went wrong, Pethokoukis thinks, is that the Democrats misread the public mood:

[T]hey also assumed that the downturn would create such a sense of economic insecurity that time would be ripe for the sort of expansive, government-led healthcare changes that the party has been dreaming of for two generations. Instead, the Great Recession made healthcare less of a priority for voters than economic recovery — as fast as possible, please — and job creation. A recent spate of polls shows concern about healthcare (and climate change and pretty much everything else) lagging concern about unemployment. Healthcare lags concern about the shocking enlargement of the federal budget deficit, which has grown partly due to government actions — such as the $800 billion Obama stimulus package — to deal with the recession, as well as by the decline in tax revenue caused by the downturn itself.

Finally, a most untimely (for President Obama) bit of reality raised its ugly head:

And then last week, the Congressional Budget Office, the respected arbiter of what new government programs might cost, calculated that the Senate Finance Committee’s health reform bill would cost more than $1.6 trillion over 10 years. That was determined to be a political no-go by Senate Democrats– a smart conclusion given the recent polling — and the committee moved on to a still evolving plan B.

Pethokoukis is an economic journalist.  Here’s the view of a “money guy,”Larry Kudlow at Kudlow’s Money Politics.  Kudlow wonders whether Obama’s problem is that the public will to support a massive change in the system just doesn’t exist:

According to a recent ABC News/USA Today/Kaiser Family Foundation survey, 89 percent of Americans are satisfied with their health care. That could mean up to 250 million people are happy. So why is it that we need Obama’s big-bang health-care overhaul in the first place?